CD – Marsèll

Roberto Paci Dalò is back on Marsèll Records, the label on which he had published Ye Shanghai in 2013, an audio-visual work based on the ghetto’s history of that populous metropolitan area. Now, in the wake of such a visionary and historiographical approach, Dalò moved his focus from China to the South Caucasus, exactly in Armenia, a land that in 1910 saw the genocide of 1.5 million human beings perpetrated by the Ottoman army. As often happens with Dalò the artistic experience unfolds across several media: a movie, an exhibition, a radio drama, a multimedia concert, and also a record release. Everything begins from well-selected texts, chosen from those of the extensive production of the Armenian poet Daniel Varoujan, killed at age 31 after being tortured by Turkish soldiers and policemen. Dalò organizes accurate sound sequences integrating these texts, rich in archival materials, imaginative plots and poetic environmental suggestions. “It was a Sunday in 1987 when I saw, in a small cinema in Rome, one of Sergei Parajanov’s films”, explains Paci Dalò, “and since then nothing in me was ever the same, and I began to gather information, text, voice and images, waging a journey in Armenian culture.” The versatile author and director of Giardini Pensili, beginning in the 1980’s with a balanced research between theatre and music, appears to be one of the few of his generation to keep a multimedia approach alive, moving at ease in those artistic border areas related today to theories of urban spaces, soundscapes and site-specific criticism. Specifically, in 1915 The Armenian Files a passionate and involved narrative is modulated by multiple influences and linkages, in an ultra-vivid junction of acoustic-electronic dramaturgy and immersive sensory perception.

 

Roberto Paci Dalò – 1915 The Armenian Files