Brucialacrime

The exhibition

Brucialacrime is the product of a four-year research project, during which Grieco, through numerous wanderings across islands, coastal formations and inland territories, collected images and impressions. The Mediterranean geographies described come together in the work as a constellation of real, simulated and imagined landscapes.

The material gathered during nocturnal actions, temporary radio broadcasts, musical and performative improvisations, encounters in harbour bars and incursions into local marching bands has been manipulated and recombined by the artist, giving rise to original musical compositions.

Transposed into the form of a multisensory installation, the work is experienced on the threshold of an immersive environmental and sonic evaporation.

The conflict of the Mediterranean landscape between sound and scent

The narrative, disjointed and multiple, rejects the sweetened and idealised image of the Mediterranean, returning instead a dense weave of contradictions, clichés, transcriptions of the real and magical realism, reflected in the relationship between portside smells, arboreal fragrances and synthetic-industrial components.

The bouquet of scents developed by Mettler in close dialogue with Grieco traces an olfactory horizon in which diverse and at times conflicting elements coexist, capable of generating emotional, experiential and mnemonic trajectories.

The narrative architecture

Within the narrative structure of Brucialacrime there are five main musical themes, which act as five characters. Geological entities, anthropic agencies, minerals, simulacra, gossip, myths and tall tales dissolve into the musical composition.

The encounter between the work and the tufa crypt of Palazzo Caracciolo di Avellino contributes to the construction of an imaginary infrastructure in which speculative lutherie, ancient and synthetic instruments and forms of hyper-folklore coexist. The musical composition oscillates between references drawn at times from popular musical tradition, at times from the Baroque, at times from the Byzantine.

The olfactory activations

A series of olfactory activations of the installation with performers and artists are scheduled over the course of the exhibition. The activations aim to further explore the questions that constitute and nourish the work: anthropic geography, disembodiment, and the transhuman and decolonial ideas tied to the oral transmission of knowledge in the Mediterranean.

Artist bio

Renato Grieco is a composer and artist from Naples. Since 2012 he has performed internationally as a soloist under the moniker kNN.

His music stems from the semantics of musique concrète and culminates in orchestrations in which ancient instruments, imaginary lutherie and sculptural rooms coexist. In recent years, Grieco has cultivated an ethics of collaboration through numerous artistic marriages, both as performer and musician and as sound dramaturg, producing performances, installations, records, hörspiel, lectures, music-theatre works and libretti.

Since 2022 he has been a PhD candidate at the Artistic Research department of the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg. From 2014 to 2019 he was co-curator of the Neapolitan festival La Digestion. Musica ascoltata raramente.

Selected appearances: B’A (2026); Prada Frames (2026); Assembly at Somerset House (2026); E Se Ci Entrassi Dentro? Centro Pecci (2026); Venice Biennale Theatre (2025); Venice Dance Biennale (2023); Fondazione ICA (2023); Radiophrenia for Rewire (2022). His most recent musical and textual works have been published by Shelter Press, Haunter Records, Akhet Edizioni, AxisAxis and ViaIndustriae.