The creative duo composed of Milena Berta and Alessandro Pedretti who combine sculpture and music in immersive performances.
Matter and sound, the tangibility of stone versus the impalpability of music. There are no more distant entities in the world. Yet Milena Berta, sculptor, and Alessandro Pedretti, musician and sound designer, have managed to blend them harmoniously in the molom project, an acronym for ” Musica Organica Legata all’Osservazione del Movimento” (Organic Music Linked to the Observation of Movement). Their research is rooted in the complex and mysterious relationship between matter, sound, and space, which they have only recently decided to provide with a performative dimension. Their performances are moments of individual and collective introspection, fluid like sound and organic like their starting material: stone.
Let's start by talking about you two separately, what is your background?
MILENA: My journey began at the art high school and continued at the Academy of Fine Arts of Santa Giulia in Brescia. After completing the three-year course in sculpture, I chose a specialization in Visual Arts because I wanted to be contaminated not only by the three-dimensional modeling of sculpture, but also by other languages. My journey has always been marked by the attraction towards stone, which I encountered during the second year of the Academy, there something stronger clicked than the modeling of clay or the carving of wood. The act of removing the material fascinates me, with each blow there is a response from the material that prevents you from being able to go back, that attention both physical and mental that becomes all-encompassing has always intrigued me. But most of all I love the plastic yield, the polishing, the signs that remain in the material. My research at the Academy was based on animal and mythological forms, then I felt the need to detach myself from it and focus on details, from there I asked myself what I liked about these processes, and I realized that it is precisely the plastic research, how to render the plumage, the fur, the horn of the animals. Processes that then turned towards abstraction with the intention of making the material more fluid, soft, and malleable, as if it were melting or moving.
ALESSANDRO: I am a musician, composer, and sound designer. I started as a musician aged around fifteen playing drums, around twenty I started playing with Ettore Giuradei, a singer-songwriter from Brescia. In those years I had the opportunity to travel around Italy and meet many people who were passionate about experimentation. I also started working in the world of media, often integrating organic sounds obtained through field recording and analyzing different geographical areas to collect their sound imprints, starting from the sound characterization of the various environments and their materials, open or closed, urban or natural. This material became a real sound bank that helped me to outline my artistic inclination. Over the years I have brought my research to many different contexts, botanical gardens, libraries, monasteries.
How did the encounter between your art forms come about: one linked to the physicality of matter, the other fluid and intangible?
M: During my research I realized that every time I worked a block of stone, I generated different sounds using the chisel, the hammer, the drill. However, I was unable to translate them. It so happened that Alessandro and I met seven years ago and from there this need for exchange was triggered to delve deeper into the subject not only from a tactile and visual point of view, but also from a sound one.
A: We immediately found many commonalities by putting our research in dialogue, which only in the last year and a half has brought us into the performative field. At the beginning we wanted to create environmental installations using found stone, without extracting anything new, to try to give it a new aesthetic and sound characterization. We contacted some municipalities of Val Camonica (Brescia), the Mountain Community, and the Cultural District with which we created a choral project called La Memoria delle Pietre (The Memory of Stones). Together with a research group of experts – a geologist, a historian, an anthropologist, and a documentary maker – we mapped all the stone extraction sites for artistic ornamental purposes in the area.
We wanted to enhance the local stone, from the Adamello granites to the white marble of the upper Val Camonica. On this mapping we developed our artistic concepts that were outlined in these sculptures whose sound part was recorded directly on site, from the quarries to the industrial plants, and then put into dialogue with more traditional instruments.
M: Each installation also has an information section that tells the project and indicates where the other works are. In 2022, when we closed the project, La Memoria delle Pietre was selected by the Permanent Design Observatory of the ADI DESIGN INDEX 2022 for the Design for Social category thanks to the educational initiatives for schools and the organization of an experimental music festival. We revisited these places of abandonment through the power of sound and art.
Tell me about molom. How do your performances work and how do you manage to transform stone processing into music?
M: molom was born more or less a year and a half ago from the need to take our research to another level: to make the public discover the exploration phases that lie behind our work. Frammenti di una matrice pronta a esplodere (Fragments of a matrix ready to explode) is the first set made up of a continuous dialogue between sculptural gesture and sound and it’s divided into four acts.
A: In the first part we use ten or fifteen second samples in a continuous loop recorded on cassettes during the project La Memoria delle Pietre. This material is reverberated or distorted creating a primordial and open sound as if we were inside these rocks of Val Camonica, to keep in mind where it all starts. After this introduction Milena comes on stage. In this phase we use this instrument built by a Sardinian experimenter which is essentially a chordophone and for us it represents the diamond wire, that is, the stone cutting phases. Then we move on to the tools that Milena uses to cut the stone.
The starting boulder is provided to us by the locations or organizations in the area, usually it is local stone because our intent is to enhance the territories that host us. Milena uses various tools to break the stone creating these fragments that she then moves on microphoned sound plates with different gestures. The sounds of chisels, hammers, drills enter multi-effect samplers, processors that I use to work in real time. 95% of the performance is live, for this reason each time the result is different based on the speed and intensity of Milena’s gestures. Although Frammenti di una matrice pronta a esplodere has a structure with its own dramaturgy, we are always at the mercy of what the stone and the space offer us, even in terms of acoustics. The performance culminates with a more nostalgic, liminal part, a moment in which one wonders if everything really happened, if it is the completion of the work or just a moment of awareness where for the first time during the performance the recording of an acoustic instrument is used, that is, a piano, catapulting the audience into a suspended, otherworldly dimension.
The essence of molom is condensed in the phrase “Frammenti di un amatrice pronta a esplodere”. What do these words mean to you?
M: Everything focuses on the fragment, while in sculpture we tend to work the block focusing on its internal shape and not on what is produced, that is, the fragment, a waste. We invite the audience to also focus on the small things that can generate something new and powerful.
Just as a pencil can draw on paper, the fragment allows me to engrave on a metal plate. At the end of each set, a document is created that certifies the work that has been done, I add ink to these engravings and take a thermal photograph of the work that is placed next to the original stone. There we ask ourselves “What is eternity”?
What role does space, understood as the physical place where you perform and interact with the public, play within your performances?
A: What has the most influence, besides acoustics, is the social or organizational context. We look for places that have ties to performance, musical experimentation, stone. Places with a predisposition to listening and to our type of language, which is personal but also ancestral. Furthermore, we are never on stage, we prefer to be among the people so that the audience can live the experience up close (but always at a safe distance).
M: For example, we recently went to Alba in this exhibition space on the occasion of an exhibition of a local sculptor. Last month we went to Fanano in the Apennines, to the Simposio della Pietra, but we are still open to meeting new contexts and audiences.
On an experiential and perceptive level, what should the public expect from your performances?
M: Before starting, we usually give a bit of context about who we are, what we do and how the performance will unfold. Our audience is very heterogeneous in terms of age and education, and we were very struck by some people in the audience who came to share their feelings and emotions at the end of the performance.
For example, on the occasion of the centenary of the Gleno disaster, we performed in front of a very young audience, made up of school students who gave us beautiful visions. Then there are people who are more interested in the tools, especially those who have worked in the quarrying and stone processing sector, or in Alessandro’s sound experiments.
A: Then there are those who are wary because they struggle to understand how a gesture can become sound and its manipulation in turn transform into sound. We work precisely in the interstices between one sound and another in which the sound material is generated. Sometimes the post-performance lasts longer than the performance itself.
Do you think your project will evolve in the future? If so, how?
A: We are experimenting with this format called Abitare il Suono, working on sound geographies with a focus on the material that will develop in four projects. One in Fanano, where we worked in collaboration with the local community that provided us with local traditional instruments found in abandoned places that we then brought on stage and contaminated with sounds recorded on site. In Bisceglie we worked with a school putting a library and a quarry in dialogue through the sounds of the book and those of the stone. In October we will participate in a residency in the Azores where we will work with local craftsmen, volcanic stone and local instruments such as the viola da terra. The last project is for the Mortirolo Ecomuseum where one of the last battles of the resistance took place. The outcome will be a podcast and a short film made with artificial intelligence starting from old period photographs. In this case we will have to go and capture electromagnetic sounds inside bunkers and trenches, ghost sounds that cannot be perceived by the human ear. We will also carry on Frammenti di un amatrice pronta a esplodere, but in parallel we want to work on these residence concepts to discover new places and characterize them with our vision.
LINK
- NINETY PERCENT OF EVERYTHING: Interview with the curator Maria Pina Usai - October 2, 2026
- Christina Nakou: the fragility of matter as a metaphor for the human condition - July 3, 2026
- The Island: Hito Steyerl at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan - December 19, 2025
