WATER AND ICE Visual and sound installation by Pietro Gardoni Soundtrack: Silvio Uboldi Critical text by Maria Chiara Wang

3 videos, soundtrack and environmental recordings. 11 minutes and 10 seconds in loop The installation consists of 240 clips made along the course of frozen rivers and streams, filming a few centimetres at a time. Each image is like a painting in motion, on the borderline between abstraction and landscape. Silvio Uboldi's soundtrack not only accompanies the flowing water but also emphasises the aesthetic beauty of this natural and vital element. Last March, the work was presented, as a single video, at the World Water Film Festival at the Forum of Columbia University in New York and at the MUSE (Museo delle Scienze) in Trento. At the musil it is presented for the first time in the complete version of 3 videos and with a soundtrack.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB44ZdqXHBc === Like snow in the sun Critical text by Maria Chiara Wang

This decomposition of white, which takes the form of a progressive movement, is the metaphor of a lost purity: the figure of the guilt of our becoming a geological force. (Matteo Oreggioni)

Water and Ice, melting glaciers and climate crisis. With this audio-visual work, Pietro Gardoni documents the invasive and pervasive force of the natural element that impassively traces its own path from source to valley. No living being or anthropic elements interfere with the filming of the water that - the only protagonist - we see oozing from the rock or flowing copiously. The lens becomes selective in documenting only those parts of rivers and streams preserved from interventions that artificially alter their course and flow. The moving images that follow one another in the video adhere to reality, no post-production intervention alters their appearance. Nature is thus freed from any human interference.

The only external element that respectfully adds to enhance the vital rhythm of water is a sound carpet artfully composed for this video installation; notes like light accents that mark the movement: a falling drop, the gradual melting of the ice, the constant flow, the gurgling, the air bubbles emerging on the surface.

For the first time, the work is set up as an installation for a fruition that involves its audience more closely, through images, movement and sound. The artist's gaze is benevolent, positive, poetic; despite alluding to the theme of glaciers melting as a result of global warming, the feeling conveyed to the viewer is one of a hymn to life.

Water and Ice also represents a return to its place of origin: all of the filming was shot in Valle Camonica and is returned to it after having touched American soil with its participation in the World Water Film Festival 2023 (Columbia University, New York).

Presenting this work at the musil - museum of hydroelectric energy is, therefore, like a circle that closes and that looks at water as a source of sustenance, as an element to be respected and immortalised in its becoming.