by Rä di Martino

Multi-channel video installation, digital animation

Where he dies, he sings is a work arising from the immersion in the corpus of Carmelo Bene’s memory through his Archive. Known for work that plays with the permeable membrane between realty and fiction, di Martino’s Carmelo Bene is offered in the video through 3D reconstruction, with a voice modelled on that of actor Lino Musella. Perfected in the gaming industry, this kind of lifelike rendering is new to her practice and she has also used software and the help of musician Simone Pappalardo to analyse the harmonic components of her actor’s voice, the sounds of each word transformed into the melody of an accompanying score. The result is a musicality closely linked to the text in a process that echoes research Carmelo Bene carried out on his own voice using the equipment of his day. Across the monitors, while one figure of the actor comes alive and speaks, the others wait accompanied by the music produced from the voice, and subtly fidget in sonic harmony.