Opening in B28, Lauriston Place at 6pm on the 29th November

“Aboutness” is a word by which the philosopher Arthur Danto tries to express the potentially infinite constellation of connections, relationships and ideas that one can experience in front of a work of art. Works of art possess an aboutness, every-day objects don’t. Within the context of the Symposium, a certainly major topic is the “aboutness” of the sounds we design; more: every single decision we make while sound-designing actually produces an aesthetic sense (after all, even a simple action such as hanging a picture on the wall does) whose “aboutness” we can’t entirely control – but that’s not a good excuse not to try to: we have to get our hands dirty.

Some spoken words can be heard, as the installation performs, taken from the recording of a Naomi Klein’s speech: at one level, she symbolizes precisely the attitude of “getting one’s hands dirty”: far from the academic world and from scientific accuracy, nonetheless she has always been on the frontline of global activism, bravely providing a “narrative” – as she would say – of the chaotic contemporary history. On a different level, the actual matter of her words falls into an attempt of taking into account the intersubjective, political area of the “aboutness”, which perhaps is there most of the times (even though sometimes well hidden). A big stimulus in this direction came from the reading of the “Second manifeste du surréalisme” by André Breton.