When Music Becomes Image

What remains of music when it is no longer written and begins to emerge from improvisation, encounters and places? This question lies at the heart of When There Is No More Music to Write, the first solo exhibition in an Italian institution dedicated to French artist Éric Baudelaire, at Fondazione ICA Milano. The starting point is Alvin Curran, a composer and key figure in international experimental music and in Rome’s vibrant cultural scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Baudelaire, however, does not set out to tell his biography. Instead, he follows Curran’s method, allowing images, sounds, memories and relationships to create unexpected connections. At the centre of the exhibition is the film trilogy When There Is No More Music to Write (2022), weaving together archival footage, Super 8 film, sound recordings and conversations with Curran. Around it, photographs, scores, programmes, objects and graphic works turn the archive into living material, evoking a time when creating meant, above all, experimenting together. The exhibition continues at Fondazione Prada, where three films by Baudelaire will be screened at Cinema Godard in October: a dialogue between cinema, music and memory that, like improvisation itself, deliberately remains open.