SAFE / March 22th, 2020
audio, 17’46” / Podcast for Samditkunst (Roskilde, DK)
voice of Safe: Holland Andrews
The Isolation Art series is a special edition of the Podcast for Samditkunst, who has commissioned a selected group of artists to create new sound pieces that address the spread of coronavirus around the globe and the subsequent isolation of people within their homes. Written during the first two weeks of lockdown in his apartment in Milan, Davide Savorani’s ‘SAFE’ takes the form of guided meditation narrated by an enigmatic character named Safe.
Safe was voiced by vocalist and performance artist Holland Andrews from her apartment in Brooklyn.
“(…) ‘Safe’ by Italian artist Davide Savorani (1977), guides you with an almost autonomous-sensory-meridian-response-chilling voice into a somewhat obscure science-fiction of a meditation scene. It addresses a ‘you’, that is, me who is listening. I am a subscriber and witness something that will optimize my life in isolation. There are tons of such offers on the real market for neoliberal self-optimization, where everything – emotions, sensations, the body, the psyche, the voice, and the mind – can be optimized through online courses and self-help books. That whole story. We know it well. In Savorani’s edition, the otherwise professionalized voice gradually becomes more and more personal, the emotions overflow, and the doubts and anxieties of reality penetrate with the guide. (…) with his work on life optimization, Savorani indirectly points to what might also be the problem with exactly this crisis art: that it was created in a desire to optimize our lives. In my isolation, I have reached nausea in terms of insulation optimization: wash your windows. Watch theater online. Go to the museum online. Watch all the world’s documentaries. Make a documentary yourself. Bake a Stone Age bread. Do yoga. Learn a new language. Keep your distance but in a smiling way when you are shopping in Irma. Stoooooop! And in a way, it’s sort of the same dissemination and optimization-stuff I meet in the project with the three sound artworks from the Museum of Contemporary Art. But then again it’s not. As such, the works are not instructive. They just remind you that isolation is a basic condition for much of the world right now. And that it’s always political to have a body. Whether it lives in Denmark, Iran, or Italy. And right now we are together on a globe that is on the verge of imploding in grief.”
Mathias Kryger / Politiken