Since Interrupted

Curated by Matilde Galletti and produced by Karussell, Andrea Magnani’s 45th Pedaso Flat Red Onion Festival unfolded as a performative environment within the garden and interiors of a decaying seaside villa. Mechanical tables, bowls of onion soup glimpsed from a shutter, abandoned placemats, and spectral sounds composed the fragile choreography of an event poised between reality and fiction. Echoing the deceptive plausibility of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, the project staged a narrative of fractures and perceptual shifts, where fabricated objects and staged actions unsettled the viewer’s sense of the real. The following conversation between artist and curator retraces this expanded dramaturgy, situating the work within Magnani’s broader practice, where installations similarly transform plausible scenarios into unsettling fictions.

Matilde Galletti: I spent the summer watching, again and again, the unfolding of the actions and installations that make up 45ª Sagra della Cipolla Rossa Piatta di Pedaso (45th Pedaso Flat Red Onion Festival). Each time, the audience was different—and so was the reception of the whole. On one occasion, there were just two of us, and I decided to take advantage of the situation by leaving the visitor—like a test subject—to wander alone through the villa’s rooms. I waited for him on the dance floor, ready to chat while the action unfolded without him suspecting a thing. The atmosphere was completely different from when large groups are present, creating noise and discussing what they see and imagine. Experienced by a single person, the entire installation—works and actions—becomes deeply immersive, even unsettling. That lone visitor emerged from the villa with his senses heightened, though not enough to anticipate the “dance” of the café tables and the final movement of the larger tables on the dance floor. We had sat there together, talking about what he had felt inside, when suddenly the tables tilted with a grotesque, sinister noise. He was caught in a sardonic trap…

Andrea Magnani: With this anecdote, you remind me of the first solitary viewer of La Terrasse, who, confused, sat next to me on the sofa of the New York gallery and began telling me what had happened to him, unaware that I was the artist. Later we found his wallet and house keys, which he had abandoned—or lost—right there on that sofa. I very much enjoy reading the audience’s reactions in their faces. My favorites are those who enter the show, take a quick look, and leave without ever “seeing” the work. I like to think that the piece somehow reveals itself to them later, like a faint lingering doubt.

MG: Yes, the same thing happened with Trapezio Gallery presenta Lo Sguardo Fuori (Trapezio Gallery presents The Outward Gaze): even collectors behaved like that—they didn’t see… After all, you really enjoy playing these kinds of “tricks.” Working with you, I noticed that you dedicate the same attention and precision both to constructing the scene and to observing the reactions, which, in a way, become a component of the entire mise-en-scène. On this note, I also recall the precision and meticulous craftsmanship with which you built the dramaturgy and choreography of the performance 45ª Sagra della Cipolla Rossa Piatta di Pedaso. Every element present in the environments, both outside and inside, was carefully calibrated in view of the unsettling trick you were preparing for the spectators.

AM: In fact, I always think of—and “treat”—the audience as one of the various media that make up the work. In some way, they complete it, activate it—or rather, sometimes I feel as though my work doesn’t exist until it meets the public. It only truly exists in that precise encounter, where it becomes charged with meaning. In the specific case of the performance 45ª Sagra della Cipolla Rossa Piatta di Pedaso—unlike other, more freeform performances—it was particularly important to work on dramaturgy, which actually follows the classical structure of Greek tragedy. I imagined it as the impossible love story between the echoes of two ghosts who, like the layers of the same onion, brush against each other without touching, tangent yet separated by a dimensional film. Distance, the physicality of empty space, certainly plays a role in this story.

MG: In this, the audio track diffused inside the house and through the villa’s windows plays a key role. The sound resembles the breathing of the building itself—somewhat tired, somewhat sad and weighed down—unsettling yet sweet. When heard from inside, its reverberation seems to fall back onto itself, amplifying the animist physicality that pervades the architectural structure activated by the performance. Outside, however, this breath, which turns into melody, acts as a call: in the garden, on the dance floor, the elements that make up the installation—the four tables—are awakened by the sound and perform a staged action, the dance, as if in a hypnotic trance. This dance is not random; even here there is a very precise intentionality, a choreography structured down to the millimeter.

AM: Indeed, soundtrack and expanded choreography are completely intertwined, like in a ballet. The sound, produced and edited by Enrico Boccioletti, originates from a recording I made in the living room of Adealdo “Dedo” Baldassarri—the historic accordionist of Castellina-Pasi, the legendary Faenza dance-hall orchestra that used to play at the Festa dell’Unità on Via Calamelli, just a few hundred meters from my childhood home. It starts with the accordion played “empty,” which swells and empties like labored breathing; then, slowly, it begins to color with notes, distant phrases that emerge into the true “theme,” before suddenly closing in a long, rising muffled hiss. The music comes from one of the closed rooms of the villa, and the programmed choreography for the four fake ready-made “tables” follows it, giving symbolic form to the story across all five acts of the dramaturgy.

MG: So, a great breathing body staging the ghost of a memory—or an animation for ghosts. A few weeks ago, I was driving home late at night and passed by a pine grove where the remnants of a village festival lingered: from the car, I heard these sounds and music, and suddenly the entire imaginary behind the construction of your performance appeared crystal clear. The spectral quality, the isolation of such situations, and the sense of decay they emanate are the same—but in your installation and expanded choreography, these aspects, together with the objects you placed inside the villa, reinforce the core of your current research: the relationship between reality and fiction, between what is constructed and what manifests in the real, within the fragile orchestration of gesture and staging. It seems to me that, in terms of installation, you always try to leave the spaces as empty as possible—or at least they seem so—because your works blend in, mimetic, ambiguous… Is this strategy functional to reinforcing the enigma of real/fiction? Does emptiness strengthen the linguistic force of your stagings?

AM: Once, while speaking about my work, I happened to say that the true artwork lies in the empty space between the elements composing my environments…

MG: Mmm… if you put it that way, it makes me think of word puzzles: do you prefer rebuses or charades?

AM: You know I’m not a great fan of puzzles? I prefer looking at comic strips, especially the ones I don’t understand.

MG: Well, that too is consistent with your artistic research, in a sense… Shall we wrap it up here, with the image of an obtuse cartoon, with improbable humor?

AM: Yes, but first I have one last question for you: what are the first and last words of the book you’re reading?

MG: Since interrupted.