On Saturday, October 10, as part of the LOCANDIERA exhibition at the Luigi Varoli Civic Museum in Cotignola, MAGMA presents a live performance by Carlo Sampaolesi, an accordionist and performer based in Brussels. Raised in a family of accordion makers, he has developed an artistic practice deeply rooted in the theme of memory as it relates to his instrument.
The accordion, like any other object, holds both personal and collective memory: an accumulation of individual stories, historical and cultural memories intertwined over time. But what happens when this object is taken apart? At what stage of erosion does the instrument cease to be physically itself and become something else?
Boîte à Musique stems from the individual memories and family legacy of Carlo, an accordionist and performer from Castelfidardo (Marche, Italy), a city internationally renowned for its accordion-making industry. Boîte à Musique is a research project that explores the memory an object retains even after its erosion. What sounds, what resonates, is solely the heart of the musical instrument, stripped of all its contents. Like a cardiac ablation, the memory (re-cordis, “returning to the heart”) of how the instrument once sounded, and of who built it, is worn away until it becomes nothing more than an echo.
