film & music live environment, italian première
with Tony Conrad violin, Silvia Mandolini violin, Valentino Corvino viola,  Marco Radaelli cello, Emiliano Amadori double bass, Mirco Santi 16mm projections
coproduction Xing/Live Arts Week, Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Bologna

Fifty-one Years on the Infinite Plain (1972 - 2013) opens the second edition of Live Arts Week in collaboration with the Teatro Comunale di Bologna in the MAMbo spaces. The original performance Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain is the ideal synthesis of Tony Conrad’s research in film, music and art. By making an environment built on projections and sounds resonate, Conrad establishes a standard for synesthetic perception, and at the same time alienating, redefining both the dynamics of perception and the disciplinary boundaries of his own work. Created in New York in 1972, Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain combines his structural approach to the unities of cinema with his minimal and open approach to music. Four projectors project a hypnotic 16mm film loop, which is associated with the continuous sounds of the musicians’ string instruments. The result is a suspended audio-visual environment which proceeds very slowly and seems self-reflective, that is, meditative and intense at the same time. Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain weaves together formal abstraction and introspective romanticism: the dynamics of a quasi-religious show and materialist minimalism, in dialogue with an open path and an artistic route similar to those of such artists as Mark Rothko, John Cage, and Carl Andre.The project is presented again today, while the same path is re-explored by younger generations of visual artists and musicians. What has changed since then is the absence of radicalism and the belief that these works can trigger levels of relationship to reality and therefore represent a political critique of the materialistic society. Beyond its rare qualities and power, this is one of the reasons that Tony Conrad has agreed to update and bring that seminal performance to Bologna 41 years later, with the title Fifty-one Years on the Infinite Plain.