Non consumiamo… (to Luigi Nono)

Olaf Nicolai
Born in Halle (Saale), Germany, in 1962.
He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Raised in the East German town of Karl-Marx-Stadt, Olaf Nicolai never received formal artistic training. He completed his dissertation on the poetry of the Wiener Gruppe in 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Literary influences have continuously pervaded his artistic output, which has repeatedly referenced the confrontation between socialist values and capitalist reality in the aftermath of Germany’s reunification. In recent years, Nicolai has staged a number of musical performances, including Innere Stimme (2010) and Escalier du Chant (2011).
Non consumiamo (2015) is a newly commissioned work inspired by Luigi Nono’s two-part composition Un volto, del mare / Non consumiamo Marx (1969). The Italian composer abandoned orchestral music in the 1960s to produce works for release on magnetic tape, which could be played in the streets and in factories. After Venetian protestors were forcefully evicted from the premises of the 34th Biennale di Venezia in 1968, Nono incorporated audio recordings of those events in Non consumiamo Marx. Drawing on Nono’s musical response to the revolutionary uproar of 1968, Nicolai invites performers to react in song to the live reading of Marx’s Das Kapital in the Ar ena at the Central Pavilion during the 2015 Biennale. Every few days one of the performers will write and sing a new song, which he or she will record with a smartphone. While the footage is subsequently broadcast to the exhibition, the songs are played on portable speaker systems that visitors can carry around the Biennale. In this way, the work transforms the entire exhibition into a stage on which viewers can assume their roles as actors.