ANOMALYE ANOMALE - Christmas Concert for a Parking Lot

During the pandemic, when circulation was reduced to a minimum, the background music of a shopping-centre car park kept playing. For long stretches there was no one to hear it. The sound played exclusively for the cars, for the concrete, for the walls.

The perversion the work exposes is a system that plays for a fraction of itself. The car park belongs to the apparatus of consumption, and so do the cars; the music exists only to set the machine in motion. It welcomes you on arrival and accompanies you to the very end of your experience: once you leave the car park, you are no longer our problem. When people disappear, the ritual does not stop. It simply goes on, addressed to objects.

Anomalye Anomale takes this logic literally. A Christmas soundtrack, simple piano arrangements of Christmas melodies mixed with the sounds of Santa Claus preparing for his journey and travelling on Christmas Eve, originally composed for Anomalye nella storia at the Moroso flagship store in Milan, was played in the underground garage of Eurodom in Osijek. There was no audience in the usual sense. The concert was addressed to the parked cars, aligned in rows like listeners, and to the walls around them.

Without a stage, without an audience, without a timetable: the Christmas concert becomes the sound of a system entertaining its own infrastructure.