Forwarding (Rod Summers)
2019

Invited to take part to Helicotrema Recorded Audio Festival 2019, Diego Tonus (b.1984) decided to forward his invitation to artist and composer Rod Summers (b.1943), as an intervention. Met almost by chance in Maastricht (NL) in 2018, Rod Summers has revealed to be also a great collector of mail art – he has one of the biggest collection of messages both in hardcopy and digital form: a collection of more than 100000 pieces in the form of mail, email, conversations and an archive of Skype interventions set in the virtual landscape of the web. For this occasion, Summers accepted the ‘forwarding of the invitation’ proposed by Tonus and presents The Death of Bees (2018). This audio piece presents two overlaying soundtracks: a background audio landscape and a delayed voice of the artist describing an uncanny scene as it unravels in front of his eyes. The processed voice becomes enigmatic as the information is not immediately reachable, therefore it transforms into secret; the audio-filter conceal what potentially happened in this ‘still life’ while Summers is witnessing the event.

Forwarding (Rod Summers) is the first intervention of a series by Diego Tonus, considering the act of ‘forwarding’ as artistic gesture thought as a practice of collaboration with other artists.
For this occasion, the audio piece, forwarded via email after the invitation, is part of that virtual landscape created by Rod’s archive of interventions and his numerous collaborations.