These works are conceived as integrated audiovisual compositions in which painting, video, and music are developed simultaneously. The visual and sonic elements are created through a symbiotic collaboration with a composer: from the earliest stages, images, sounds, and structures influence one another and evolve together, rather than being added sequentially. Paintings and drawings generate animated video material, while piano performance, tape, and live electronics shape the temporal and emotional architecture of the work. Each piece is designed as a single immersive environment, often presented as a live performance accompanied by video and an exhibition of paintings, where image and sound function as inseparable components of the same expressive space.
Photos from the concert on November 28, 2025, at Teatro Sant’Andrea, Bergamo.
General premise
These videos are conceived as explanatory documents of live intermedial performances. The works are primarily experienced in performance, where piano, live electronics, video and painting coexist in real time. For the purpose of documentation, the piano part was recorded and combined with electronic elements, then edited together with the video material in order to convey the structure, atmosphere and perceptual outcome of the live experience.
Op. 8 No. 31
2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, oil on canvas 60 x 50 cm.
Darknesse visible (1997)
Thomas Adès (b. 1971) – Reworked by Amalia Castoldi/ Francesco Rota
Darkness Visible is based on a contemporary piano piece by Thomas Adès, itself a re-composition of music by John Dowland. Dowland’s original work contains a deeply dark, almost horror-inflected poetic imagery, which remains largely concealed in the musical surface due to the performance practices of its time. Adès’ reworking introduces a subtle tremor that gradually stretches the musical tension, keeping it constantly on the verge of emergence. The intermedial reworking by the artist and Francesco Rota does not alter this structure but offers a perceptual key to it: through video, form and sound, the work explores the act of glimpsing one’s own inner sensations within darkness, as they intermittently take shape and are revealed by an unstable, discontinuous light, comparable to that of a candle.
Op. 8 No. 33
2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, video art.
Montagne Déchireé – ce qu'a vu le Monsieur Croche (2006)
Manfred Trojahn (b. 1949), Douze Preludes No. 2 – Reworked by Amalia Castoldi/Francesco Rota
Montagne Déchirée originates from a piano work by Manfred Trojahn, subtitled “What Mr. Crooked Saw.” The piece alternates a strongly agitated and dramatic character with a third theme marked by the composer as “dreaming,” softer and more suspended. The title recalls a figure used in a horror film as the name of a possessed toy. In the reworking by the artist and Francesco Rota, the musical form is reinterpreted as a radical dilation of a single instant: from the opening to the final arpeggio preceding the last six measures—where a varied reprise of the third theme appears in a slow tempo—the entire work unfolds within the moment immediately before an act of self-harm. Within this compressed temporal space, two primary emotional forces are condensed and collide. “Mr. Crooked” becomes an ambiguous humanoid figure, simultaneously a personification of inner agitation and a manifestation of the insistent, destructive impulse—the proverbial “devil on the shoulder”—that pushes toward harmful action.
Op. 8 No. 31
2025. Video, 2-channel tape, music for piano, oil on canvas 60 x 50 cm.
Unus Mundus (2017)
Ingrid Stölzel (b. 1971) – Reworked by Castoldi/Rota
The musical source of Unus Mundus is a contemporary piano work by Ingrid Stölzel, described by the composer as an emotional landscape and structurally conceived as a circular form, in which the ending returns to the beginning. In her notes, Stölzel refers to the concept of yin and yang as a generative principle. The reworking by the artist and composer Francesco Rota expands this idea into an intermedial investigation: yin and yang are treated as two complementary modes of being rather than as specific emotions. In the video, they appear as alternating phases of the same place— thinking of Silent Hill—while in the painted image they coexist simultaneously, forming a unified space (unus) where opposites are held together rather than resolved.