Valentina arrived at Triennale around 8 pm.
She had been awake since 6 am. London – Milan. The clock hands had travelled farther than her pulse.
We were happy to see each other again after Silencio club in Berlin at Maurizio’s afterparty where Valentina had been one of his chosen musicians.
She smelled of Santal 33.
Again.
It was my perfume in 2017. Whenever I smell it, I return to that year, to everything beautiful that happened there.
Smell is an ancient form of memory.
One breath and you are elsewhere, willingly or not.
Valentina went to soundcheck. I stayed in the entrance hall of Triennale and opened my notebook. I tried to listen to the rhythm of my own pulse and let my hand follow it across the page.
I conducted an experiment:
What happens to a drawing when its only instruction is blood and rhythm?
Later, looking at the page, I thought the pulse must have been calm. Serene. Almost tender.
Then Valentina finished her soundcheck and we went to the restaurant.
I ordered mountain tea. She ordered something warm and vegetarian.
I was full of energy. Two hours earlier, I had eaten pizza real one, not gluten free.
I felt as if my dopamine and serotonin levels were so high that I had taken a pill of amphetamine.
Valentina, meanwhile, was exhausted after travelling since six in the morning.
We had different internal weather systems.
We found a balanced rhythm. I slowed my speech to meet her pulse.
We talked about the hidden sound, hidden fuga inside the body. The body as a miracle and how much of it remains hidden until we discover it. Most of it concealed. Most of it happening without an audience.
Meanwhile, the organising team appeared to have ordered the entire menu.
The waiter looked like Al Pacino doing a white line every forty minutes.
He began bringing the dishes one by one, like on a fast track.
At some point, a breaded vegetarian ball arrived. It was presented to Valentina as vegetarian.
She took a bite.
Her face changed.
Fuck. This is meat.
She expelled it immediately.
Alberto, the organiser, apologised in the name of the restaurant.
The second dish was Valentina’s original order. Something warm.
It was cold. A salad, or something pretending to be one.
She surrendered.
Eventually, pizza. The Italian institution. Still standing on the table after all the misunderstandings.
Alberto watched her eat with nervous tenderness. Each new dish presented the same question:
Was it actually vegetarian?
Then the waiter brought another speciality.
It looked like a bird’s nest.
Valentina liked it.
Alberto’s heart returned to its proper position. The crisis was over.
Then Silvia arrived. JASSS. She joined us. I had never heard for her before, though her name was already familiar in the nocturnal sonic world.
She told us she had watched The Matrix again the day before, after many years.
I asked if she was also a sound artist.
Yes, but not as genius as Valentina, she said.
What do you do? I asked, and before she could answer, I said:
Okay. I got it. You are what you are. That is enough.
Exactly, she said.
Then Valentina began pressing her upper lip.
A little blood appeared.
I can taste blood in my mouth. What is this? Valentina said.
A mystery. No sharp object, nothing obvious that could have injured her. We became detectives. The bird’s nest was my only suspect. It had looked robust enough to cause trouble, but the theory remained unproven.
We all looked at her mouth.
For a moment, the restaurant became a Gina Pane performance. The queen of pain and blood.
The blood continued.
On a perfectly white napkin, Valentina began leaving the prints of her upper lip.
One after another.
A series of bloody signatures.
An artwork produced by the body without the artist’s permission.
This is really a work of art now, I said.
I can sell it for six million. Like Maurizio’s banana, Valentina replied.
More than the banana. This is real blood. That was just a real banana taped to a wall, I said.
The ritual continued.
The heart, that ancient percussionist had begun leaving evidence. Perhaps the body is the first instrument and bloodstream, its oldest form of music.
The heart pumping.
The blood appearing.
One trace following another.
Blood began to flow in its own rhythm, the heart conducting what the mouth could no longer contain. One drop followed another, like her drums: the body composing its first music before the hands ever touched her instrument.
Then Valentina went to change her garment for the concert.
I was left holding her cotton napkins.
They were no longer quite white.
To me, they were worth a fortune.
They were precious, because something real had happened to them.
Something irreversible.
While we waited for Valentina to appear onstage, I sat in the concert VOCE hall and thought about Milford Graves, her favourite percussionist.
He understood rhythm as the fundamental principle of life.
The body is not simply boom-boom, boom-boom.
Between two audible beats, something else is happening.
Vibrations. Frequencies. Changing intervals.
Blood, sweat, tears, pleasure.
The body doing things before the mind has time to name them.
I thought of Graves.
I thought of Magaletti.
I thought of the percussion of her cardiovascular system, which had taken place before the concert.
The heart conducting an instrument nobody had asked it to play.
Rhythm doesn’t begin with the drum. It began in the body: in the heart, the pulse, the breath, the nervous system, walking, movement, and the continuous changes that keep an organism alive.
Then Valentina stepped onto the stage, alive, her lips pulsing, sending a signal through the entire evening.
The blue room, like ocean eyes.
I closed my eyes and sank into Valentina Magaletti’s cardiovascular system.
Time passed without passing.
When she plays, I slip into a parallel timeline, where the clocks keep a different pulse.
Their hands move according to another law. Another pulse. Another beat.
When Valentina Magaletti plays, time becomes a static eternity.
Then I opened my eyes. It felt like waking at the end of a blue dream.
Valentina bowed before an audience drifting in the same blue dream as me.
The organisers changed the lights. Suddenly, the room turned pale yellow. Through the sound system, Franco Battiato’s Bandiera Bianca began to play while they dismantled her drums and prepared the setup for DJ JASSS.
Then we hugged. The blood on Valentina’s lips had stopped flowing. Exactly when the concert ended.
At some point, everything stops. The blood. The heart. The music. Life.
That’s why Miles Davis said that the hardest thing in music is not playing the notes, but knowing when to stop.
She changed clothes and ordered a ginger beer.
She told me she hadn’t been drinking alcohol for several months. I brought her another ginger beer.
I asked for a Molotov Cocktail. Bartenders looked confused and afraid.
I put them out of their misery and said: Okay. One ginger beer.
We spoke about art and sound as the highest form.
Then, out of the blue, Marina Abramović. Maurizio Cattelan. As if these names belonged to the same anatomy.
Then Valentina went to sleep.
I went to the bar, ordered a John Cage water and thought about one thing:
We will never know what really happened to Valentina Magaletti’s lip.
Just as we will never know what really happened to Laura Palmer.
Perhaps the whole evening was an episode of Twin Peaks, directed by David Lynch from the other side of the rainbow.
I choose to believe David Lynch was responsible for Valentina Magaletti’s split lip.
He wrote the script.
He arranged the blood.
He directed the entire thing from a distance.
The body followed instructions or perhaps the body was the only one giving them.
I got on my bike and rode home through Parco Sempione.
Through the trees, I saw a pink light.
Sunday, 00:31am.
I was leaving the town of Twin Pink’s.
