Alan Alpenfelt Swiss performance and installation artist, theatre director and trainer, community & youth radio empowerer, record producer. 

Tramando Cesare Lucchini

︎︎︎Photo by Antoine Läng 
« Siamo sagome sfocate in una luce incerta, viviamonel dubbio, ci interroghiamo sul senso della vita, vulnerabili, consapevoli di non essere nessuno. Cerchiamo di dimenticare, non pensare. Ma la terra trema, noi tremiamo. »
Joséphine Bohr.


Capiscimi: non è il fondale nero che ognuno di noi porta dentro di sé, a spaventarci, né lo è la forbice che minaccia il filo sottile che ci attacca alla vita. Ma piuttosto l’indifferenza, che asciuta in egual misura le lacrime di chi piange a stomaco pieno e a stomaco vuoto.”
Tito Bosia 



Sound installative performance
One-off

Concept 
Alan Alpenfelt

Texts
Joséphine Bohr
Matteo Luoni
Tito Bosia
Anne Haug

Paintings
Cesare Lucchini

Cesare Lucchini lived on an axis between Cologne, Ticino and Milan and in this light we are interested in retracing him through the narrative views of artists of the word who live and create in and between these territories: Germany, internal Switzerland, Italian Switzerland and Italy. These perspectives will contain the personal experience of each author on Lucchini's artistic medium, on the territory, but also on their biographical data, in contact and "collision" with the biographical and exuberant data of the pictorial artist.

If the exhibition is titled "the earth trembles", we played with the word "tremble" transforming it into "plot": what will be the plot of the meeting between these writers and the artist?

The creative process started from contact with Lucchini:
Four authors (Anne Haug, Tito Bosia, Joséphine Bohr, Matteo Luoni) visited the artist's studio, in the industrial area of Lugano, each at separate times.
The meeting was recorded and became the creative basis of a specific writing, which captured the painter's work and life under different facets.
The geographical origin of each playwright involved and their "nomadic" professional history, between different cities and towns, became the generating meeting point of four textual and sound dramaturgies: in the centre, as in the large canvases exhibition in Mendrisio, four different human landscapes, lost between transcendence and immanence, this time no longer made of pigment and matter, but of words, sounds and voices.

[...] “Ragazzi, il Signore è del Milan. Und en Teil der Gäaste stegh auf, ich schöre, kommt zu mir, umarmt mich, piacere, piacere, wenn ich will, dann darf ich am Sonntag mit ihnen Fussball gucken. Ein Platz am Milan-Tisch ist reserviert. Und nun war alles klar. Die vier Bildschirme hägnen da, um Inter, Milan, Juventus un Napoli zu schauen. Und ich war nun fester Teil des Milan-Tisches. “[...]  
Anne Haug.

[...]
“Paura di restare, fermarmi, e capire d’un tratto, che la vita era tutta lì. Che non avevo più occhi per conoscere altri artisti, mani per dipingere altri quadri, forza per tendere un’altra tela.
Paura di te.” [...]

Matteo Luoni

In collaboration with
Museo d’Arte di Mendrisio

Funded by
FSRC/SRKS
Oertli Stiftung


︎

One off. 

Mein Vater Erzählt Mir Jeden Sonntag Unsere Neun Planeten


A ship is the greatest reservoir of imagination. Civilizations without boats tend dry up their dreams. Espionage replacesadventure, police replace pirates.
Michel Foucault


24h performance
Site-specific

2018 ︎

Concept
Alan Alpenfelt, Francesca Sproccati


Mein Vater Erzählt Mir Jeden Sonntag Unsere Neun Planeten is a sound and performance installation curated by Alan Alpenfelt and Francesca Sproccati. It invites the public to discover heterotopic spaces where the experience of listening and sharing solitude helps to detach ourselves towards unfamiliar places, to a spiritual space that re-opens the imagination, creativity and the way we reflect upon things.

Two urban shops are transformed into spaceships and inhabited by two astronauts for the duration of 24 hours, both connected by a radio transmission.
The first one is a radio station that wants to question the unknown spaces beyond the boundaries of the Earth through the practice of listening.
The second one is a place where the gaze is focused on the relationship of intimacy between human beings, exploring the distance that separates one body from another through the practice of listening and spending time dancing, taking care of a garden made of memories of encounters with old people.

Francesca and Alan are both convinced that there are fewer and fewer uncontaminated places on Earth to explore alternative views on society and on themselves. So they decided to go into Space; a place in which the absence of gravity allows new experiments.
By entering a spaceship and navigating in solitude, they can drift towards heterotopic spaces made of sound and subjective time, where listening experiences and meditation help them to detach from what is known and defined. A necessary and spiritual space to re-open their imagination, creativity and the way they reflect upon things.

Unlike utopias which console us by giving us virtuous and perfect spaces to imagine, heterotopias suspend any sort of given truth. They are disquieting because they secretly undermine our language, break up and tangle clichés, devastate the "syntax" that keeps words and things together. They dry up the pre-existing discourse, they block the meaning of words, retracing their roots from every possibility of grammatic expression.

In a world overwhelmed by visual consciousness and political compliance, Alan and Francesca want to explore new places capable of cultivating alternative imagination.

Each in their own, they pass a day and a night bathed in spatial sound “travelling” for 24 hours from a point A to a point B. On their way, they encounter objects, planets and ufos that activate sound works collected during a call. Every minute of the transmission of the journey corresponds to 4,101,650 km.

The public can freely access the two spaceships at any time of the performance and remain with them as much as they want. They are invited to listen together and participate in the solitary activities that each astronaut undertakes while passing the time during the long journey.



Discover more here
︎ https://francescasproccati.ch/mein-vater








︎
Past events

Altofest Matera
Matera, I
15-16.11.2019
Site

BIG
Biennale Interstellaire des espaces d’art Genève
Genève, CH
28-30.6.2019
Site

ChiassoLetteraria
Corso San Gottardo 8A,
Chiasso, CH
13-14.5.2019
Site

CoseCosmiche
Fondazione Arthur Cravan, Milano IT
Residency
16-17.12.2018
Site



Funded by 
ProHelvetia
SRKS/FSRC
Republic and Canton of Ticino - Swisslos

Thank you, honestly, thank you



The Sky is a sea of darkness, when there is no sun to light the way. 
Sun Ra Arkestra

Neither will it be other than other, while it remains one; for not one, but only other, can be other than other, and nothing else.
Plato





Text
2023

Part of:
Common Actions
by Olivia Wiederkehr
https://www.oh-wiederkehr.ch/

Dramaturgs
Letizia Russo
Manolis Tsipos
A text based on Free to be grateful - n° 18 of the Freedom of action Manifesto by Olivia Wiederkehr. 

Can you be grateful to a person you never knew but who you are directly related to and that the most difficult thing to tell this person is that you are grateful?











Waste Kompost Radio


In every piece of recorded sound, there is a kind of potential for its undoing [...] you can actually recompose as well as deconstruct the underlying logic of a tune and make something completely other out of it.
The Strangeness of Dub - Edward George


Sound Installation
2022 ︎  

Concept & Waste collection
Daniela Allocca
Alan Alpenfelt

Sustained by:
Pro Helvetia
Migros Kultur Prozent


︎
Upcoming: 
check WKR site for next broadcasts

Waste Kompost Radio is a radio flow composed of sonic waste discarded during editing processes. Radios, composers, artists from around the world are invited to send their unwanted “sound waste”, everything which has been considered wrong or useless and therefore cut out. It is collected and processed through algorithms which gradually decompose the information in the same way biological and chemical reactions decompose organic material into compost.

The time in which we live is characterised by a disproportionate production of objects, which translates into a disproportionate production of waste. According to some scholars we have moved from the anthropocene to the Wasteocene (Armiero, 2021): we are in fact living in the age of waste. The culture of waste is a culture that has unlearnt to reuse waste or to envisage a production where nothing has to be discarded. We are fed official narratives to follow and asked to relegate waste to unseen hiding places, we use the margins as a receptacle for the unseen rather than enhancing them as a place of richness and proliferation of diversity.

Art finds its life in waste. Art is not immediately something beautiful to look at or listen to. But Art can help us rethink official paradigms by taking discarded imperfections and offering us a lense into looking at them more closely. Inside the narratives of waste we might find that unwantedness is the source for a new and healthier world.
This is why we wish to explore the concept of compost and create a parallel system that decentralizes humans from their main narratives and places them as listeners of what they decide is not fit. It means assuming responsibility for what is being discarded and at the same time asks them to contribute actively in a conscious way.

Compost is the observable proof of how life is a cycle made of interacting differences, where nothing remains the same and everything serves a greater purpose.

Waste Kompost Radio constitutes a place of sonic inclusion where its practices learn from the forest how to relate to all living things. This inclusive process operates as a translation taking place in compost, recovering what is considered unproductive, excluded and useless and transforms it into a sonic fertilizing substance, giving it back in an enriched form to the cycle of life.



Site
wastekompostradio.com


︎
Past


WKR 25h broadcast - #01
11 - 12 February 2024

WKR Installation launch
FIT Festival, Lugano - CH
4-8 October 2023

WKR Residency
Palazzo Trevisan, Venice
Pro Helvetia Arts Residency
17 - 23 October 2022

Le Festival des Échecs
Espace libre Visarte
Biel/Bienne (CH)
30.6 - 28.7.2021

Binaural Views of Switzerland



︎︎︎More photos below!
Listening to reality through the amplification of a microphone is like secretly entering the fabric of the world. It’s like drifting with your ears inside a dense matter, leaving your face out to breathe. It’s spying without malice. [...] It’s the clanging of cow bells woven with the cries of playful children, creating a sound substratum of the Alps; or that of a powerful mountain waterfall mingled into the roar of a military jet. In an unrestricted state of freedom in which things can flow, sounds move, influencing each other as if in an endless dance.
Alan Alpenfelt



Audio-visual installation
2019 ︎

︎Selected for Pro Helvetia Swiss Selection Edinburgh

Concept, journey, sound recording
Alan Alpenfelt

Kaiser Panorama 
Franco Mondia & Antonio Lo Menzo.

Soundscape creations
Enrico Mangione


︎
Upcoming

No exhibitions scheduled atm. 

︎
Past


Brixton House
London, UK
8-12.3.2022
Pro Helvetia Swiss Selection
brixtonhouse.co.uk

SonOhr
Grand Palais, Bern, 2022

Edinburgh Fringe,UK
Pro Helvetia Swiss Selection
Summers of 2020 & 2021
CANCELLED (Covid-19)

Lugano High School 1
Lugano, CH
2 - 14.2. 2021

SonOhr Festival
Bern, CH
26.2 - 7.3.2021
https://sonohr.ch/
CANCELLED (Covid-19)

FIT Festival internazionale del Teatro e della scena contemporanea
LAC Hall - Lugano, CH
5.9 - 11.10.2020
https://www.fitfestival.ch/

PHOTO IS:RAEL
Tel Aviv, Israel
11.2020
(”Selfies” video sequence)
http://www.photoisrael.org

Swiss Stereoscopic Society annual assembly
La Chaux-de-Fonds, CH
14 - 17.2020
CANCELLED (Covid-19)

4th International Conference on Stereo & Immersive Media
Lisbon, Portugal
18 - 20.6.2020
CANCELLED (Covid-19)

Accademia di Architettura
Università della Svizzera italiana
Mendrisio
14.11 - 5.12.2019

Binaural Views of Switzerland is an audio-visual observation of the changes caused by human activity in the Swiss Landscape since 1863, when the pioneering British photographer William England made his Grand Tour of Switzerland, creating stunning stereoscopic photographs of over 150 locations.

Artist Alan Alpenfelt, over a two month journey, re-discovered 30 of these locations, documenting the changes in their aspects and atmospheres, re-presenting them in his exhibition, using binaural sound recording and 3D photography.

His work highlights the stark contrasts between past and present by immersing the visitor in the sights and sounds of each environment, then and now.

The centre of the exhibition is a Kaiser Panorama, which features the stereoscopic photographs linked to headphones through which the visitor can choose between the contrasting binaural soundscapes of the present day or the imagined ones of the past.

Awareness of the effects of mass tourism, modern transport, climate change and industrial development pervades the exhibition, stimulating questions as to how resilience and conservation can somehow still be achieved.


Discover more here
︎ binauralviewsofswitzerland.com

All the locations Alan visited on his journey, are placed in Google Maps Street View. Will you find them all?
︎ Here is one...






Special thanks to
London Stereoscopic Company and Peter Blair for providing information on William England.

Funded by
Pro Helvetia
FSRC/SRKS
Oertli Stiftung