It is a matter of ear, it is often said, the music. Music or sound. Because perhaps “sound” is the word that best suits Pier Alfeo’s artistic investigation. We are not talking about music in this case, and perhaps not just about sound, but about sound art. A label that fully represents the artist present in the exhibition. A label that, like all labels, is general, superficial, always leaves something out but outlines exactly a field of interest: sound becomes poetry, analysis of the present, material to reach more complex concepts and deeper sensibilities.

Among sculptures, installations, artist’s books, sound in Pier Alfeo becomes the instrument of investigation of the matter, or materials, of our present and our future.

Pier Alfeo’s work is undoubtedly technological: the sound expands through compositions implemented by algorithms.

Alfeo does not abandon himself to the perturbing charm of technology, which bewitches when we see its functioning, but activates a common thread that accompanies his work: the passage, or rather the union between two elements that are only apparently distant, the organic and the technological. Sound becomes a vehicle for a further relationship with natural elements, and for the union of two temporalities: that of the duration of the performance and that of archaeological time, an interior time that echoes within our emotional strings.

In archeology, for example, time becomes history, it becomes the primary material for the investigation of fragments that come from the past and from the depths of the earth. A land that today represents our future, a land to be rediscovered, a land that speaks in its entirety beyond the anthropocentric vision and that could even represent its overcoming. This is the concept underlying the works of Alfeo, where the exploitation of the physical laws between the symmetry of the spatialized sound structure and its engraving in the organic randomness of wood, for example, is evident. Return to the organic, to the exploitation of primary physical forces, to the discovery of a new relationship with nature: the foundation of existence in its physical and biological configuration.

What exists beyond reason, what determines our instincts and the uncontrollability of the physical elements. In an era of technological development, of a humanity that wonders if our future will be dominated by machines and cyborgs, by technological prostheses, the artist hints at the possibility of rediscovering what we often forget or have excluded: to be, again and again. always, earth, world and universe.