Mark Vernon is a sound artist and radio producer whose work explores ideas of audio archaeology, magnetic memory and the re-appropriation of found sounds. He runs and co-curates the Glasgow art radio station and festival, Radiophrenia.
2024
Featured Transmission(s):
- Aired on May 26th 07:00 CEST 2024
- Saturnine Orbit
- Genre: Art Radio
- Duration: 60 min
-
Mark Vernon revisits the life and work spaces of an isolated and meditative Morandi, making the debris of everyday life reverberate through spectral soundscapes and eerie tones: an exercise in modern hauntology.”
‘Saturnine Orbit’ is a radio for work made for the Casa Museo Giorgio Morandi and in the spaces of the Campiaro barns (a favourite subject of the Bolognese painter during his holiday periods in the Bolognese Apennines in Grizzana Morandi). The work was produced as part of the ART CITY Bologna 2024 festival in association with XING, MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna and NEU Radio.
The piece was composed entirely from the sounds of Morandi’s summer house, his studio, replicas of the objects used in his still lifes and sounds recorded on the mountain trails he would often walk, starting behind the Casa Morandi.
Alongside field recordings collected on site during a production residency, Vernon employed Morandi’s objects as sound instruments, using the negative space of bottles, pots, jugs and vases from the Casa Morandi studio as small resonant chambers, while the environmental field recordings of the surrounding countryside were played from inside these objects using tiny speakers amplified by microphones. Through this process the outside becomes the inside: the world in a bottle. The piece also features excerpts from the only extant recording of the Bolognese artist’s voice.
