Video Ensemble

C_Music NOW

About six years ago – when the planet had retreated into a peculiar kind of limbo under the weight of the Covid-19 pandemic – the Russian composer and artist Sergey Khismatov devised a new audiovisual format, which he dubbed “Video Ensemble.” Within this medium, he fused his fascination with the spatial diffusion of sound and the moving image, producing short or longer audiovisual bursts that engulf the senses and generate momentary formations of meaning. Despite the labour-intensive nature of the process – requiring near-surgical interventions into largely unprocessed material – what ultimately defines these video ensembles is their spirited, irreverent brio, echoing a maxim by his beloved Mark Twain: “Laughter is the greatest weapon we have as human beings, yet the one we use the least.”

In his installation at Peiraios 260, Khismatov presents three instances of this cutting practice. In POLITUNES, he isolates vocal hesitations and verbal suspensions drawn from live speeches by politicians, dictators, and populists, assembling a micro-composition in which the uproarious intertwines with the unsettling. The material of SUONO POVERO consists of a choir of waste – sounds produced by crushed packaging, bagged refuse, and objects on the verge of their final exit from the cycles of life and consumption – offering a condensed reflection on sustainability and environmental collapse, while also revealing the imprint of Arte Povera on his artistic vocabulary. In ROTONDA, Khismatov invites friends from around the world to send recordings of creaking doors. The plaintive “song” produced by their opening and closing evokes the very gesture of admission or exclusion, a poignant allusion to global migratory flows and to a culture of tolerance and empathy.

These videos are neither sonic curiosities nor exercises in self-referentiality, but autonomous and substantial works emerging from the restless workshop of a composer who harnesses the full spectrum and dynamics of musical thinking: crescendo and decrescendo, accumulation and release, pianissimo nuance, the kinetic logic of an orchestra, an expanded percussive lexicon, and, above all, the expressive capacity of noise. If all this feels somewhat overwhelming, there is no need for concern; this is, after all, the taste of the twenty-first century.