"I like all images related to water and places penetrated by water: Venice is the most beautiful example. To come back here after twenty years is still more touching, in these days, with this light. Today I woke up at 5 in the morning and I went for a long walk” Brian Eno smiles relaxed, he is in a good mood, dressed in a black very British chalkstripe that averts him from the first apparitions with Brian Ferry and the Roxy Music in the 70’s (even though, putting aside the jacket with an ironic face, he shows a constellation of bright green sequins, slightly off limits). In 1985 he came to Venice invited by Gabriella Cardazzo at the Gallery “Il Cavallino” to do some experiments on light with crystal installations, doing small pencil geometric drawings of the Fondamenta Briati seen from above, from Gabriella’s house. The occasion for this passage to the lagoon is the Biennale of music, which this year opens with an installation by Eno, “Painting like music” in the dark and obscure space of the fuel depot of the Arsenale, the Cisterne space. Between the empty and rusty cylinders unwinds in complete darkness a sound and vision itinerary that leads to a sort of altar-piece created by screens continuously changing calligraphic self-produced images: “The biggest screen is composed of 77 millions of possible configurations which continuously, slowly change”-he explains - “The most interesting thing of this work is that nobody can see it in its whole. It is an idea that resembles the unbroken work of nature, continuously changing, ephemeral; it has a lot to do with the mystic experience of giving up to something, of not opposing resistance, letting things happen, penetrate” says at the end of the route - “in this sense the computer offers unlimited possibilities, unusual constantly evolving creatures can come out of it. I am inspired by a sentence from John Cage that urges art to imitate life in its various operations”.

In his study, dipped in a huge synthetizer, the camera approaches him slowly, almost investigating. It happens in the highly aesthetic film made on the road by Gabriella Cardazzo together with Duncan Ward, from the Death Valley and the endless spaces of California, to New York, up to Woodbridge, the origins of the pioneer of Ambient music, an English town crossed by a long river, where he was born in 1948. Brian is improvising an acoustic space, a liquid cave; liquid sounds which he puts in a continuous variation. He is taken in the attitude of constant transformation that makes him a multiform character in the contemporary musical scenes, that makes him serenely claim not to feel forced in any definition: “I do not belong to any world, I have the possibility to change inclination with extreme freedom. My music is involved in all what happens outside my window. I simply try. I like to get to know all border-situations, to reach the extreme and then retire to a more comfortable position”. It is a successful portrait which went on for two years, where images have the talent to expand in spaces of sound: “Brian is a periscope of great sensibility and profound discipline – reveals Gabriella – very strict, almost a mathematic spirit with an enormous interest for science, informed about all what is going on”.