"Through this creative process I want to experience the energy that changes when bodies make ancient and youthful sounds."
Italian artist Alice Visentin has been painting and drawing for years. But for some years now, she’s also been collaborating with folk singers from her region, Piedmont, to realise performances related to the mountain tradition. In particular, they’ve worked on provincial chorales that recover ancient oral narratives in the form of 'emotional hymns'.
Together with the writer Lucy Sante, Alice dreamed up a performance called Maktoub Sonata that perfectly expresses Maktoub’s ethos of culture and experimentation. This consisted of a flash mob on the streets of Paris, in the form of a chorale featuring ten popular Parisian choristers. They performed traditional melodies, with lyrics written especially for the occasion, at different times in different places across the city of Paris. The bodies and voices of these singers created a poetic and unexpected space in the urban texture, in an alternation of motifs from different musical traditions.
What does Maktoub mean to you?
When I first heard this term, I didn't know it. As is always the case with me, I love having things explained to me by those who know more than me. I asked friends of Arabic descent to start approaching a term for which – in Italian – I realised that many words are needed to translate it.
Mido, with origins in Casablanca, told me it means “written”, and added: “a destiny already written”. Asking him to try a little harder to make me really understand his feeling, he replied: “acceptance and strength for life”. I realised that for me it is an approach to a deeper spirituality, rooted in a culture not far from my own.
Can you share a Maktoub moment in your life with us?
Following the Covid-19 pandemic, I had to leave my studio in Turin. It was located inside the Michelin employees' club where I had been working and painting for more than five years. The owners told me they had to set up a structure related to the containment of the pandemic. That place was fundamental to me and I was afraid that without it I could no longer express myself through art.
After an initial moment of disorientation, I was flooded with a great feeling of trust and acceptance. And I precisely felt how the constellation of my life was – quite simply – moving elsewhere.
What is your deepest motivation in collaborating with our fashion brand? What do you expect to learn?
I grew up among wholesalers and seamstresses with an aunt who sold womenswear. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I spent long afternoons with her cutting out, dyeing, sewing and arranging garments to sell. For me, it was a fun game that had to do with colour, shapes and bodies. Real, human stories intertwined with stories of fabrics and bouncing beads.
I have the distinct memory of my aunt encouraging customers to wear the clothes that best represented them, with no pre-determined style constraints. Perhaps it is because of this personal history that I accepted this challenge with great curiosity: to see a big fashion house work for the first time will be for me to see in a big way the passion she has always put into her work.
What’s your vision for your collaboration with Maktoub?
My vision was clear from the beginning: to bring my research on the atavistic song and oral tradition to the idea of a collective return to the streets. The reading I was most inspired by is an amazing one that I have known for many years. The book is called Taz, Temporary Autonomous Zone by Peter Lamborn Wilson better known as Hakim Baj.
This book brought me closer to the idea of a complete and dense cosmos, a collector of times that coexist and slip off the map. What I want to develop with this collaboration is an increasing interest in performativity and singing. (A choir will perform in different gardens and spaces in the city of Paris, moving without a precise map and whoever happens to be passing by...) Through this creative process I want to experience the energy that changes when bodies make ancient and youthful sounds.
You’ve worked a lot with traditional choirs in Italy. What impact will your experience have on this project?
Working with traditional Piedmontese choirs has brought me closer to an ancient and collective historical memory. When I started working on this project, I often thought of Hildegard von Bingen, a German saint of the early Middle Ages, a poet, writer and mystic. I thought about when she wrote her hymns that we still know today. The power of the words handed down through time decided me to work with very ancient pieces.
The creation of this work allowed me to further deepen my interest in rewriting. Thanks to the presence of the writer Lucy Sante, we are working on mixing new inventions, borrowings and rewritings of ancient texts, remixing them.
How do the themes of diversity and bodies impact this project?
Like songs, mixed and remixed by time and space, bodies also take on vitality through diversity. The perception of this feeling brings me closer to the poetic space of contemplation.
What’s your relationship to literature and poetry?
For me, literature and poetry are a kind of impalpable cartography made up of voices and signs that intertwine with the world through visions and feelings.
