Separated Worlds – United Worlds


'Giardini Pensili Giardini Pensili

Event in the shape of a concert
Dedicated to Henry D. Thoreau
With Isabella Bordoni & Roberto Paci Daló
Lyrics by Isabella Bordoni
Music by Roberto Paci Daló
A production by Giardini Pensili 1988

Through the everlasting relationship between the lyrics by Isabella Bordoni and the music and images by Roberto Paci Daló all the works of Giardini Pensili are developed. Nature in all its relations to the spirit and the mind is continuously present.

TERRE SEPARATE TERRE UNITE is dedicated to Henry D. Thoreau, an extraordinary author and philosopher, whose works of the past years show such a comprehensive relation to Nature as to sweep away all affectation and ecologisms. What emerges is a real understanding and communion with the Earth. In all the works of Giardini Pensili this attitude, both analytic and of complete adhesion, is permanently present. The landscape – real as well as mental – has always been the focus of the group's research, from a pure visual enjoyment to working structures (musically spoken: Partiture Sonore, i.e. Sound Scores, geographies in which instrument and score are a topographic unit; the use of sound landscapes; lately the observation of the most minimal variations of light and shape in landscapes, their graphic and photographic reproduction, in order to extract compositions that are later on transcribed into traditional scoring).

This geographic and tactile enjoyment is then incorporated into the proper personal approach of the Jewish world and culture from the works and reflections of Jabés, Levinas, Benjamin, Scholem to the short stories by Singer, Peretz, Aleikhem; the Jewish notions of Book, Silence, Time. What is most fascinating is the centrality of errancy within this Jewish culture, errancy in thoughts, physical errancy. Errancy is research and research is pilgrimage, the pilgrimage of monks along a secondary road, along paths that are almost invisible in a friendly, though cruel vegetation. Relations as defined in the tables of Correspondence by Athanasius Kircher ("Poligraphica seu artificium linguarium, quorum omnibus totis mundi populis poterit quis correspondere", Rome 1663).

The works of Giardini Pensili proceed by subtraction and nullification. The final point, the void, is rich and fructiferous. Music, writing, image, theatre, they all are nothing but tools. The song is the guideline for the pilgrim and the monk. Through the song the union between Heaven and the Earth is realized. The work moves geographically among these "tools", respecting the autonomy of each. And the synthesis, too, is but a tool.