Soundwalk Collective, Jesse and Patti Smith, and Lillevan collaborate on poetic audiovisual exploration of Nico’s death in Crossing the Line presentation
KILLER ROAD
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Thursday, October 2, $40, 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
A limited number of tickets have just been released for Killer Road, a one-night-only event that is part of FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line interdisciplinary arts festival. On October 2, Soundwalk Collective, the international trio of Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi that specializes in site-specific audio installations, and mother and daughter composers and musicians Patti and Jesse Smith, will convene at Florence Gould Hall to present a tribute to Velvet Underground lead vocalist and Factory actress Nico. The presentation, originally performed earlier this year in Nico’s native country of Germany, focuses on Nico’s death at the age of forty-nine in 1988 while riding a bicycle on vacation in Ibiza with her son Ari. Soundwalk Collective will incorporate samples from the harmoniums that Nico played — one of which was given to her by Patti Smith after her original instrument was stolen in 1978 — as Smith reads Nico’s last poems (“Facing the wind / it’s holding me against my will / and doesn’t leave me still”) and video artist Lillevan provides visual projections. “Patti was very kind to me,” Nico said about Smith, as noted in Richard Witts’s biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon. “Early in 1978 my harmonium was stolen from me. I was without any money and now I couldn’t even earn a living playing without my organ. A friend of mine saw one with green bellows in an obscure shop, the only one in Paris. Patti bought it for me. I was so happy and ashamed. I said, ‘I’ll give you back the money when I get it,’ but she insisted the organ was a present and I should forget about the money. I cried. I was ashamed she saw me without money.”