The sound sculpture Ad lib. (2013) combines a medical machine for automatic pulmonary ventilation with a few organ pipes that play a musical chord to the constant rhythm of the mechanical breath, creating an artificial organ that is metaphorically a mechanical requiem that plays incessantly a C cluster chord producing a dissonant sound.
The title of the work Ad lib., an abbreviation of the Latin expression “ad libitum”, is a musical caption that gives the performer discretion of interpretation, allowing for instance to repeat “at will” certain bars of the score. The Latin expression “ad libitum” literally means “at the discretion”, “at will” and is generally used to express the freedom of a person to act according to their own judgment in a given context.
The sculpture aims to refer to the situation in which people, who suffer from critical health conditions, see their survival tied to a breathing machine and, therefore, to the discretion of those who are taking care of them.