Villa Lontana presents Hidden Noise: Sonitus Occulti, an exhibition by Cory Arcangel and Hampus Lindwall that brings together a constellation of archival documents, scores, artworks, and sonic materials by the artists, alongside contributions from Ellen Arkbro, Nils Henrik Asheim, Pierre Bismuth, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Tom Crawford, Marcel Duchamp, Flavor Flav, Haley Fohr aka Circuit des Yeux, Joy-Leilani Garbutt, Amina Hocine, Stine Janvin, Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (EVOL), Hanne Lippard, Haroon Mirza, Phill Niblock, Charlemagne Palestine, Seth Price, and Akira Sileas. 

The exhibition centres around Hidden Noise, a series of Fluxus-inspired organ concerts initiated in Paris in 2018 by Cory Arcangel and Hampus Lindwall as a platform for commissioning new repertoire for the pipe organ. The title is borrowed from Marcel Duchamp’s À bruit secret (With Hidden Noise), the 1916 readymade produced in collaboration with his friend, collector and art critic Walter Arensberg. Duchamp asked Arensberg to place a secret object inside a ball of twine, later sealed between two metal plates, creating a work that, when shaken, produces a hidden noise whose source remains unknown to this day. 

The exhibition retraces the four iterations of Hidden Noise, beginning with A Portrait of the Artist (Paris, 2018), initiated around the premiere of Arcangel’s Alle Fugler, a piece composed for Lindwall, alongside an organ arrangement by Lindwall of Arcangel’s Sweet 16 and works by Marcel Duchamp and Phill Niblock. The second chapter, They Told Me There Would Be Tea (London, 2019), expanded the project through newly commissioned works by Ellen Arkbro, Pierre Bismuth, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Tom Crawford, Haley Fohr aka Circuit des Yeux, Hanne Lippard, Haroon Mirza and Charlemagne Palestine. Remind Me Tomorrow (online, 2021), the third iteration of the project, unfolded digitally during the Covid-19 pandemic as a livestream and included new compositions by Stine Janvin, Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (EVOL), Seth Price, and Akira Sileas and performances by Nils Henrik Asheim and Joy-Leilani Garbutt. Terms and Conditions (Düsseldorf, 2024), the most recent iteration of the series, foregrounded Arcangel and Lindwall’s own compositions within an extended organ programme in which Arcangel premiered a full-scale concert version of Chord Memory while Lindwall performed multiple works from his recent oeuvre. 

At Villa Lontana, Hidden Noise: Sonitus Occulti translates this evolving concert series into an exhibition form, becoming the fifth iteration of the project. Archival materials, ephemera, annotations, artworks, and video are brought together as active scores operating as systems of transmission. The exhibition foregrounds Arcangel and Lindwall’s shared interest in the pipe organ as a historical technology capable of producing contemporary forms of abstraction, automation, error, devotion, and noise. 

Across the exhibition, composition appears as a mutable technology of encoding: a set of instructions, gestures, diagrams, repetitions, and linguistic protocols through which sound may circulate before – or even without – becoming audible. Some scores resemble scripts or conceptual propositions; others function as mnemonic devices, visual patterns, encrypted texts, or performative commands. Together, they form a dispersed repertoire suspended between reading and listening, execution and latency, storage and activation. 

Alongside works by Arcangel and Lindwall, artworks by Pierre Bismuth, Hanne Lippard, Haroon Mirza, Phill Niblock, Charlemagne Palestine and Seth Price unfold in dialogue across the space. Duchamp remains a spectral presence throughout the exhibition. His score Erratum Musical was included in the programme of the first Hidden Noise concert in Paris, yet ultimately remained unperformed – a suspended instruction, neither fully activated nor absent. In Hidden Noise: Sonitus Occulti, this unrealised execution becomes part of the exhibition’s structure: a score may persist as possibility alone, as notation without resolution, as a form of hidden noise. 

In Rome – a city shaped by ritual practices, inscriptions, hidden chambers, and layered systems of transmission – Hidden Noise: Sonitus Occulti approaches sound less as an event than as a latent condition: something stored within objects, architectures, codes, and bodies before becoming audible.