Alessandro Carboni's As If We Were Dust at Attraversamenti Multipli

Alessandro Carboni (b. 1976) presented As If We Were Dust as part of the Attraversamenti Multipli festival organized by Margine Operativo in Rome's Quadraro district. The performance uses a grid of one hundred bricks arranged in five parallel rows of twenty, evoking Carl Andre's Lament For The Children. Carboni moves through the space, permuting the bricks' positions among three states: standing on short side, standing on long side, or lying flat. The action is accompanied by a glitch sound loop of a record needle at the end of a disc with reverb, later joined by deep mechanical thuds. The work draws on Carboni's Em:tools method, a quadripartite urban mapping strategy developed during his PhD at City University of Hong Kong's School of Creative Media, which archives postures from performer-space interactions. The performance culminates in bricks being stacked in a corner, with fragments from breakage grouped in pairs, highlighting the tension between rigid conceptual structure and chance. The piece references Orlan's MesuRAGEs, using the body as a measuring unit against urban space. The event took place at Garage Zero.