NEUNAU is an artistic project focused on sound research, started in 2015, in Valcamonica. This ancient name was found carved on a rock surface in the LOA area, an Iron Age sacred place of recent discovery.
The project is carried out through an archaeological and musicological approach to sound research.
NEUNAU’s sound investigations develop from the smallest details conveyed by a sound source, capturing and studying these sounds, searching for their musical potentiality, with the aim to produce audio tracks and documentary clips, where the main character is the sound itself, used to tell its own story.
The first work, published in 2016, was realised in the forge of Bienno, in middle Valcamonica, where still nowadays iron is hand worked with the use of an ancient, huge, sledgehammer. The forge itself has been equipped as a recording studio, by placing a number of microphones in specific points of the room, in close contact with the blacksmiths and their metal tools. The outcome was published as a music album and a video documentary, previewed by Vice Creator Project America.
In 2016 NEUNAU also realised a site-specific live performance in the old and dismissed thermoelectric powerplant
of Daste e Spalenga in Bergamo, in collaboration with the installation “Passi” by artist Alfredo Pirri.
In 2017, under a commission by Comme des Garçons, NEUNAU produced the music track “Concrete”, working along with Vice France also on the creation of the video documentary “Sound of Concrete”, that follows the journey of the cement, from the explosions in the quarry of Tavernola to the working places inside the Pantano dam.
