On the occasion of the Giornata del Contemporaneo, the Italian Cultural Institute of Washington, in collaboration with the Embassy of Italy, presents "4 ELEMENTS", a project for videomapping and piano by the Italian visual artists of Imaginarium Studio and musician Sun Hee You.

A dreamlike journey, filled with legendary anecdotes and references to science and philosophy, guides the audience to the discovery of the connections between the 4 elements (fire, water, air, earth) and the human being, as well as the fundamental theme of the loss of environmental consciousness.

The event will be introduced by the opening remarks of Ambassador Mariangela Zappia.

Following the performance - from 6:30pm to 10:30pm - a special 10-minute video-mapping will be projected in loop on the Embassy façade.

LOCATION

3000 Whiteheaven Street NW

Washington, DC 20008

COVID POLICY: Valid Photo ID with proof of full Covid vaccination OR Covid antigen test (24 hours prior to the event for non-vaccinated people) are required and must be provided to the guard at Embassy entrance.

Face masks are required while at the Embassy

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REGISTRATION REQUIRED

A registration is not a guarantee of a seat as these are assigned on a first-come first-served basis. Doors close at event start-time. Date subject to change.

THE PERFORMANCE

4 ELEMENTS, from an idea by Francesca Pasquinucci and Davide Giannoni of Imaginarium Studio, together with pianist Sun Hee You, is a project for piano and videomapping, with music by Chopin, Casella, Liszt, Debussy, Vacchi and Hyung-Ki Joo.

A dreamlike, enchanted, surreal journey, filled with legendary anecdotes and references to science and philosophy, discovering the incredible connections between the 4 elements (fire, water, air, earth) and the human being, to offer the audience artistic food for thought on the fundamental theme of the loss of environmental consciousness.

Nature is both "container" of animal and human life, and biological "content." Plants (and water, air, earth), animals and humans are scientifically placed on the same level of importance, but over the centuries man, craving for short-term riches, has radically altered his relationship with this dimension by thinking of himself and placing himself on a higher podium than the other two elements and enacting inordinate actions devastating the primordial ideal of transcendence of Nature itself.

4 ELEMENTS, is an opportunity to speak to a different audience with the tools of musical harmony, which brings us back to the concept of natural harmony and attunement between the elements, and visual poetry, with an intent to raise awareness about the future (and present) of man and our spectacular planet Earth.

The chapters of 4 ELEMENTS are amalgamated by the "sounds" of gravitational waves captured by VIRGO and provided by EGO European Gravitational Observatory in Cascina, the project's scientific partner.

THE MUSIC

C. DEBUSSY - Feux D’Artifice

ALFREDO CASELLA – Dai nove pezzi per pianoforte Op. 24 N. 1 in modo funebre

F. CHOPIN - Barcarolle Op. 60

C. DEBUSSY – Jardins Sous La Pluie

HYUNG-KI JOO (1973) – Chandeliers

C. DEBUSSY - Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest

FABIO VACCHI (1949) – Echi d’ombre

F. LISZT – Après une lecture du Dante – Fantasia quasi Sonata

THE CHAPTERS

1

FEUX D'ARTIFICE Claude Debussy

FIRE

The destructive and creative fire of the Heraclitean "BECOME" is one of the archés of the cosmos. And if for Empedocles fire is one of the four "roots" of the earthly tree, for Heraclitus fire is logos, the origin of the All. The masculine fire of the warrior and the philosopher is destroyer and creator with an equal will to power over the things of the World, while the feminine fire is tamed by love. In this first chapter we are faced with the ending, or the actual "end." We find ourselves in suspended in the cosmos, in the guise of a virtuous traveler who finds himself a helpless spectator to the explosion of his planet. A physical and emotional destruction: human consciousness lost.

1BIS

FROM THE NINE PIANO PIECES OP.24 NO.1 IN FUNEREAL MODE Alfredo Casella

FIRE

Oblivion turns into an epic flashback of civilization. What have we lost with the disintegration of consciousness? What symbols, feelings, ancient connections, readings and glances, have we abandoned?

2

BARCAROLLE OP.60 Fryderyck Chopin

WATER

Water as a symbol of REBIRTH and MEMORY. A human life restarting from a scientific, biological memory. Water as the chemistry of the elements, as the invention and fusion of every element ever known, useful for the restart of the earth's natural mechanism and the cosmic vibration that orders life.

3

JARDIN SOUS LA PLUIE Claude Debussy

WATER

An inverted rain proceeds upward to recreate a constellation and life out of water. The appearance of an UNDER and an OVER, like a primordial composition of sky and fauna, draws us into a poetic tale, which is almost a dance, of the first fusion of the elements of WATER and AIR.

4

CHANDELIERS Hyung - Ki Joo

AIR

Air becomes the counterpart of the SOUL. A soul that at first is "virtuous" and then is "lost." Man, born from the elements of the stars, appears. Movement, harmony and speed show the TIME OF NATURE and the TIME OF MAN. Initially everything is in time; man, animals and plants proceed at a "speed" that is sustainable for all dimensions. But things change when man, coveting riches of various kinds, begins to set his life on a very fast time that is no longer tolerable by all beings around him. The machine goes haywire and connections between human beings and nature begin to be lost.

5

CE QU'A VU LE VENT D'OUEST Claude Debussy

AIR

This time we narrate despair from Nature's point of view. We are confronted with the breakdown of COMMUNICATION with man. A planetary electrocardiogram that becomes flat, two souls that no longer relate by any possible means. A technology that is no longer virtuous, but only used for purposes of very short-term enrichment, without a vision of future-oriented growth.

6

ECHOES OF SHADOWS Fabio Vacchi

AIR

A new era is upon us. After the undoing of human actions, we are facing a rebirth, a reconstruction of the "human" dimension that passes first of all through a new "technology of the soul." Now consciousness has all the elements to issue a new breath and pose in a virtuous manner toward all kinds of inventions that can improve the human future.

7

FANTASY QUASI SONATA Franz Liszt

EARTH

Eventually, the element Earth merges with all the other elements to transform into the best form of itself. Earth as REBIRTH. Rebirth as light, knowledge, vision and virtue.

IMAGINARIUM STUDIO

SUBJECT, DIRECTION AND VISUAL ART

IMAGINARIUM, a Tuscan studio active since 2011, awarded in 2018 as Italian Excellence for Art by the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles and the Iacc Italy - America Chamber of Commerce West, deals with set design and visual arts for music and opera.

It is directed by Davide Giannoni and Francesca Pasquinucci, who after their musical, literary, artistic and theatrical studies, developed their research focused on the interaction between traditional material arts and digital arts, turning their interest to videomapping as storytelling and the creation of dreamlike dream spaces, finding in them an additional device for the study and evolution of their surreal style, anchored in the rules of poetry.

Davide Giannoni is a professor of orchestra, a double bass graduate of the Luigi Boccherini Conservatory of Lucca. A scholar of animation technology, he specializes in the development of creative artistic content for live entertainment and multimedia installations.

Francesca Pasquinucci is an illustrator. She graduated in History of Theater from the University of Pisa, with a specialization in Theatricality and History of Performance in Pop Rock Music, then continuing her in-depth study on opera and the history and techniques of digital scenography, which she still blends with traditional drawing techniques and material scenography.

Their need to combine storytelling and visual expression has led them to create scenic projects, coordinated image, video games, multimedia installations, for some of the most important Italian theaters and opera festivals (including Teatro Ponchielli in Cremona, Teatro Sociale in Como, Teatro Municipale in Piacenza, MOF Macerata Opera Festival, Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari, Teatro del Giglio in Lucca, among others), for orchestras, classical musicians and the Italian and international pop scene (for Universal Music and Virgin Records Italia).

In 2022 they were visual artists-in-residence of FESTIVAL PAAX, the 1st Riviera Maya festival of classical music and art in Mexico, directed by M° Alondra de la Parra.

SUN HEE YOU

PIANIST

"Brilliant virtuosity and refined musicianship, that stylistic malleability needed to play a frontier style like Kapustin, Sun Hee You is convincing in her most characteristic jazz performing freedom, while coming from an exquisitely classical background."-Gastón Fournier- Facio. Hailed by international critics and audiences for her latest disc dedicated to the frontier composer between classical and jazz, Nikolai Kaspustin, for which she has been compared to the legendary Oscar Peterson for rhythm-timing and Bill Evans for sound and touch,

the South Korean pianist is a shining example of a next-generation classical musician.

Sun Hee You was educated in Seoul and attended the Yewon School, Korea's famous musical institution for child prodigies, after winning several competitions from her early years of piano study. She made her debut as a soloist at the age of 13 with the Yangeum Orchestra in Seoul, performing Beethoven's Concerto No. 2 and Haydn's Concerto in D Major. At 14 she moved to Italy where he graduated from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, continuing her studies with legendary pianist Lazar Berman.

Her particular focus on contemporary music and the search for new repertoires has intrigued a number of contemporary composers, including one of the most talented of the latest generation Marco Quagliarini, who dedicated his concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra Murale published by Suvini Zerboni to her.

She performs at important institutions and music festivals such as, Società del Quartetto di Milano, Società Aquilana dei concerti Barattelli, Accademia musicale Chigiana, I Concerti del Quirinale, Festival delle Nazioni, Ravello Festival, Roma Jazz Festival, Ohrid Festival, performing as soloist with orchestras: Sinfonica Abruzzese, Sinfonica di Roma, Kaunas Symphony Orchestra, Stara Zagora Symphony Orchestra collaborating with conductors Julian Kovachev, Rui Massena, Pavel Berman, Francesco Ivan Ciampa, Yun Ho Chu.

In addition to her traditional concert activity, she is engaged with special projects and level collaborations. She was Special Guest in singer-songwriter Max Gazzè's Alchemaya Tour treading important Italian arenas such as the Terme di Caracalla, the Sferisterio in Macerata, the Arena di Verona and the Teatro Antico in Taormina and bringing the music of Rachmaninov, one of his favorite composers, to a very large pop audience.

Recently the new single Chandeliers was released, with the idea of giving a message of hope in this time of pandemic.

The music is written by Hyung-ki Joo, right after 9/11 while the composer was living in New York. Along with the single is the video clip, written and directed by the artist herself, which was filmed at an evocative location abandoned after the earthquake in Abruzzo.

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