Audio Track and Performance for one participant at a time, Sound Corner #81
February 1st – 28th
A project for the Sound Corner space at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, curated by Anna Cestelli Guidi, with a presentation by Cecilia Casorati and the patronage of PhD Program #38 in Cultures, Practices, and Technologies of Cinema, Media, Music, Theatre, and Dance at Roma Tre University, in consortium with the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, the National Academy of Dance, the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia, and the University of Teramo.
In collaboration with Giuliana De Santis and Gauri Abbattista.
Waiting is a phenomenon that encompasses every possible trajectory of experience: whether it occurs in crowded places—from refugee camps to hospitals, from hotel lobbies to waiting rooms in train stations and post offices—or in private moments like waiting at the doctor’s door for a dreaded result, queuing before a live event, or enduring the endless lines on the ring road… every space-time characterized by waiting becomes a potentially treacherous interstice in the emotional fabric that is stitched together throughout the day. In the ever-imposed condition of waiting for something or someone, it can easily happen that we slip into an “abstracting” gaze: a gaze from the outside that, in the best cases, allows us to connect with a sense of our own existence in the world precisely by virtue of the pause imposed on everything else; in the worst cases, it allows us to come to terms with the unknown to come and the devastating anguish it generates.
Audio Track: Produced both in Italian and English language, it offered for the whole month five minutes of centring, a useful technique to employ the time spent in the space for internal observation practices,following every indication my voice gave to those in listening mode;
Performance: held on February 6th and 7th and then from February 19th to 22nd, from 3:00 PM to 8:30 PM, it welcomed one person at a time for approximately 20 minutes, with the aim of transforming the sense of waiting into a space of staying, where the causality of presence was no longer truly important, but rather the quality of what was experienced in the moment. Specifically, I offered each visitor an internal observation practice and an exercise in incorporating those who experience waiting differently than we do, due to culture, geography, personal circumstances, or macro-politics. The goal was to expand the capacity for empathy, like a reverberation that encompasses every word, every image, every action, remaining in a shared, participatory listening.
Credits:
Matthew Stevenson, Gianni Piacentini, Manuela Gavagnin,
Maria Monti, Giulia D’Alia, Elena Giulia Rossi, Benedetta Lusi.