Original drawings, letters, musical notations, studies, sketches; diverse materials testify the longlasting and prolific association of projects and ideas that existed between the Venetian composer Luigi Nono and the painter Emilio Vedova. After a first stop in Rome, hosted at the Santa Cecilia National Academy for the Abbado Festival at the beginning of October, the exhibition Vedova/Nono-Logbook, from "Intolleranza ’60" to "Prometeo", will be at the Sale Apollinee of La Fenice Theatre.

The exhibition has been promoted by the Venice Foundation and organized by Stefano Cecchetto together with Daniela Ferretti. Gigi Nono’s research is full of many revealing encounters, so powerful that they become real thunderbolts of inspiration and movement in the path of his research, always submitted to doubt and ready for contamination. One can imagine to what extent the overwhelming solar energy of Vedova could interfere with Nono, in the period during which he was contemplating the relationship between sound and colour, on the basis of deep studies on the different colour theories, from Goethe to the Bauhaus, the the Russian Avant Garde of the early twentieth century. Emilio Vedova talks about some mysterious "many": "Born as dynamic weapons, of an aggessive sign that could not stay in its static position (…) gesture that needed to become body in a space of its own, articulated, tentacular, becomes aggressive body, troublemaker". A urgent gush becoming free expression, concretizing in Nono’s work "Intolerance ‘60"; multiples showing themselves in the form of broken surfaces, sudden appearances girding the viewer in a cynetic wave, and making him take part to the show. Vedova amplifies them, insisting in their embodyment and definying them as anti-illustrative, alphabets of our time which are compenetrated, lived together and contrasting at the same time. A complex space with multiple listening, going on up to the Eighties with the titanic enterprise of the "Prometheus", the tragedy of listening. "We must go on searching, wandering, going forward; we walk as on water, without a way. Our device is "maybe" (Luigi Nono on the Prometheus).

At the ground of the "Prometheus" there are the long talks with Massimo Cacciari, talks during which "everything kept developing", and it is Nono himself to give us notice of that in the interview given to Enzo Restagno at the end of the 80’s: "The original idea was to conceive the work as an archipelago formed by many islands. The result are not separate scenes but islands, so that the so-called route of the "work" would have appeared as as a navigation wandering between these islands".

Cacciari remembers how "we transformed the texts endless times; we broke them, divided, brought nearer, with immense "care". An important part of the vision was in the initial idea and the light-colour issue represented one of the biggest obstacles towards Prometheus. There have been many encounters and discussions between Nono and Vedova which were dedicated to analyze the various possibilities in order to find a relationship between sound and colour that wasn’t just mechanical. "With Vedova we thought about plates and a wavy, moving kind of projection. He showed us some wonderful plates he had made in a glass workshop in Murano, in occasion of the world expo in Montreal". The architect Renzo Piano would take care of preparing the exhibition in the former San Lorenzo church, trying to plan what could be planned, "no solutions, but many different possibilities, like navigations to be found through the stars and the deep sea" (taken from a letter of Nono to Renzo Piano). The general equipment is imagined as an ark, a colossal decomposable whale’s abdomen: "The instrument-place of Prometheus appears almost as an unfinished ship, a ship in a shipyard, not a perfect and unmovable place".