DESASTRES by Marco Fusinato has made its debut in the Australia Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale.  Curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor, DESASTRES will be live for the entirety of La Biennale Arte 2022. The work is an invitation for audiences to come together within a high-intensity concentration of energy.

In the installation for DESASTRES, Fusinato uses equipment associated with spectacle as a form of sculpture. The work is unique each day it is initiated and, as it unfolds, it will radically transform the physical experience of each audience member. Fusinato says: “My idea of activating the audience is to remind them that they are alive. That they have a pulse”.

The large-scale, immersive artwork sees Fusinato improvising slabs of noise, saturated feedback and discordant intensities with an electric guitar, triggering a deluge of disparate and disconnected images onto a freestanding floor-to-ceiling LED wall. The pavilion is simultaneously a de facto studio and a space for research where Fusinato can test cause and effect in real time.

The images are sourced via a stream of words that have been put into an open search across multiple online platforms. There is no theme as such, rather the immersion of sound and image is open for the audience to interpret and make sense of. The intent is to create some kind of hallucination, elation in disorientation and exhaustion from confusion.