Living Room opening

Living Room at Archivio Conz will be open to the public:
April 28, 6pm–10pm / April 29, 11am–6pm / April 30, 11am–6pm

Inaugural program
April 28, 2023
6pm: Luciano Chessa performs Walter Marchetti’s Natura Morta
7:30pm: Esther Ferrer performs Las Cosas
RSVP required, limited capacity

April 29, 2023
4pm: Luciano Chessa performs Robert Ashley’s Maneuvers for Small Hands 
RSVP required, limited capacity

April 30, 2023
4pm: Cia Rinne performs sentences

Archivio Conz is pleased to announce the opening of Living Room, on the ground floor of its space in North Charlottenburg, Berlin. With the double function of archive and gallery, Living Room at Archivio Conz will host public symposia, performances, and presentations, intimate encounters with artists and scholars, while also highlighting editions from Edizioni Conz. For its opening on April 28th, Living Room will feature editions from the avant-garde collective ZAJ. From 1964 until it disbanded in 1993, ZAJ engaged in interdisciplinary practices ranging within music, theater, visual art, and poetry, later shifting toward an emphasis on gesture, Happenings, and performance, thus frequently linking the collective to Fluxus.

The choice for Luciano Chessa to pair together Natura Morta and Maneuvers for Small Hands in a series of two consecutive concerts chronicles the friendship, intellectual exchange, and mutual admiration between Marchetti and Ashley, witnessed firsthand by Luciano Chessa. After Ashley’s last performance at Mills College in Oakland in 2014, he asked Chessa if he had played Natura Morta yet, given that for Ashley it was one of the most moving piano pieces ever written. On April 28th, at Archivio Conz, Chessa will perform Natura Morta for the very first time.

Natura Morta (1980), composed by ZAJ co-founder Walter Marchetti, is an hour-long work written for a grand piano whose closed-top lid is entirely taken over by a cornucopia of fruit, vegetables, flowers, and bread. An almost shapeless, uninterrupted single line at first appears to proceed aimlessly. What is first perceived as non-directional, however, eventually reveals an inevitable teleology. The inexorable flow of life slowly unfolds, progressing towards the one certainty: that of one’s transience.

Following Natura Morta, Esther Ferrer will perform Las Cosas (1990). Esther Ferrer was a prominent member of ZAJ from 1967 onwards, experimenting with body, energy, objects, voice, ideas, and reasoning. Presence, space, and time intervene in her actions to elicit effects and interpretations from the viewer. Ferrer plays with discomfiting spectators, using the absurdity of the situation as a catalyst for action without intending to communicate anything. Instead Ferrer urges spectators to improvise their own dialogue and draw their own connections. From here, the presence of the performer (Ferrer), the presence of those who receive and actively or passively participate in the action (the audience), and the space-time in which the action unfolds, together forms the performance.

On April 29th, Chessa will perform Robert Ashley’s Maneuvers for Small Hands, a notated composition and puzzle-box from 1961 which Francesco Conz made into an edition in 1988. This piece—a score that through a complex assembling process becomes a tridimensional object—is a reflection on the act of music-making which calls for a disassembling of it to its most fundamental components: composing, performing and listening. The focus of the composer here shifts away from the selection of pitches and rhythms, and moves on to contemplate the acoustics and dimension of the venue, the placement of the audience, that of the performer.

Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, audiovisual and performance artist, and music historian. Chessa’s compositions include A Heavenly Act, an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with original video by Kalup Linzy; Cromlech, a large organ piece he wrote for Melbourne’s Town Hall Organ; and the opera Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago, a work merging experimental theater with reality TV which required from the cast over 55 hours of fasting. Chessa has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial, and in 2014 he presented three events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe. Chessa’s work appeared more than once in Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, and Frieze; and has been featured in the Italian issue of Marie Claire and in the September Issue of Vogue Italia. Luciano Chessa would like to thank Mimi Johnson and Gabriele Bonomo for kindly providing the manuscripts for Robert Ashley and Walter Marchetti, respectively.

For the opening weekend’s finissage on April 30, Berlin-based poet, author, and artist Cia Rinne will perform sentences. Cia’s multilingual minimalist texts reduce philosophical and linguistic questions to tonal sequences, playing with phonetic shifts in meaning. Her performances, exhibitions and sound installations have been shown internationally in galleries and museums. She is the author of four volumes of minimalist, conceptual and translingual poetry published in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Switzerland and Canada, most recently sentences, shortlisted for the Prix du livre d’artiste Bob Calle. Cia is the laureate of the Prix littéraire Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou 2019.

Archivio Conz is dedicated to the presentation, promotion, and research of Fluxus, Concrete Poetry, and Lettrism. It holds one of the largest collections of Fluxus art in the world, amassed over five decades by visionary collector, publisher, and photographer Francesco Conz (1935–2010).