For her Phonogram, artist Beatrice Bonino collaborated with musician Anastasia Patellis, aka Any, on a new composition titled Any Lamentation (The Lowest Level of the Human Mood).

The work begins from Bonino’s sense that the rooms of Villa Cerruti still hold traces of the emotions once invested in the objects they contain – coarse, persistent, almost material feelings still hanging to the works themselves. Though Any never visited the Villa, this was one of the sensations Bonino described to her most vividly as they developed the piece together. 

In the Collection, like in most private collections, the artworks emerge as pharmaka, in the Derridean sense: at once sources of relief and poison, sources of knowledge and corruption to one’s internal dialogue. Their ambivalence lies at the heart of collecting itself – in the long desire for possession, the brief satisfaction of acquisition, and the unease that may follow. The emotional trajectory of Francesco Federico Cerruti has been described by art dealer Massimo Di Carlo as starting with a lamentation, “a sort of Beethovenian crescendo that started from the lowest level of the human mood”.

Any’s electro-acoustic composition for solo harp gives form to this tension between desire, possession and unease. Built around the cyclical repetition of the Phrygian mode, the music turns the harp’s natural resonance into an unstable, suspended soundscape. Developed in an intimate recording session with sound engineer Richard Wenger in Berlin, using concert harp and a Hologram Microcosm granular-effects pedal, the instrument’s sound is fragmented into cascading micro-loops, glacial ambient textures and slowly accumulating drones.

Conceived as a singular work, Any Lamentation transforms these lingering traces into sound: repetition becomes longing, resonance becomes memory, and the lament never quite resolves.