THE VOICE AS MEDIUM at Spazio Murat
Disturbances in the darkness of the ear.
The second season of Sussurra Luce resumes June 1 with a conference entitled THE VOICE AS MEDIUM – Perturbations in the Darkness of the Ear, curated by Enzo Mansueto and Massimo Torrigiani with Francesco Cavaliere. The conference opens Sussurra Luce’s program of concerts, installations and performances.
Through the contribution of artists and experts from diverse disciplines, the conference draws a line (inevitably curved) that connects the history and philosophy of the voice, the aurality of Brahmanism, Auto-Tune, human and non-human voices, word and text, Bene, the troubadours, radio, and the androids.
With a multidisciplinary approach and exploratory curiosity open to every drift, The voice as a medium intertwines voices on the voice, on the eve of the second edition of the Sussurra Luce festival, which has its genesis in the speckled relationship between orality, sound, music, gesture, and happening.
“A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine” is the beginning of Company, the prose work by Samuel Beckett that had as its title The Voice, in addition to Verbatim and the almost definitive, bilingual, Company/Compagnie, which tried to nail to the page the indomitable, the unnameable – The Voice, precisely –, putting into resonance the products of the art of speech, hybridised by their sister music, whether they are performative, theatrical, sound or, again, stubbornly written.
Appropriating the Italian translation of Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (La voce come medium), a title by Steven Connor, bright star of the observed constellation, we listen to the infinite declinability of the voice, in a darkness disturbed by the breath of being t/here.
Sussurra Luce is a project of performances, record productions, radio broadcasts, and research initiatives, curated by Francesco Cavaliere and Massimo Torrigiani for Fantom, a publishing house. It explores the relationships between sound, word, voice, media and technology, in the spaces between orality and text, technical elaborations, algorithms, and electricity. It listens to the voices of minimal organisms, of seemingly deaf and mute things, confusing images of the everyday and the fantastic. Already active as a radio programme on Radio Raheem, Sussurra Luce has published three records: Talk Shop by Hanne Lippard, Zoomachia Disc 1, a fable in music by Francesco Cavaliere, and Il calore animale, four stories by Ginevra Bompiani, read by the author and set to music by Caterina Barbieri and Tomoko Sauvage.
Sussurra Luce is an event series produced and organized by Spazio Murat. The series is made possible by the partnership with Regione Puglia and the professional, technical and collaborative contribution of our sponsors:
IMAGO PLUS
Dmb Italia
Pepe Graphic
SPEAKERS
Alessandro Bosetti Composer and sound artist, he works on the musicality of language, the voice understood as an autonomous object, the relationship between sound and memory, questioning aesthetic categories and postures of listening. Thèses/Voix – a collection of texts between theory, poetry and score – was published in 2021 by Les presses du réel, while the vinyl FasFari and the CD Portraits des Voix have just been released for the Xong and Kohlhaas labels.
Mattia Capelletti Independent curator and PhD student in Cultural Studies at the University of Palermo, where he works on aesthetics, politics, and technologies of the voice. His work is inspired by advances in archaeology and paleoanthropology that encourage the hypothesis that human music and language arose from the imitation of nature, and in particular birds. But what role does mimesis play in this relationship, both in complicity and dominance? Humans and birds, language and music, are intertwined in works of contemporary art that lead us to reflect on a relationship marked by the prevarication of man over animals, but potentially still able to throw bridges beyond the threshold of the species.
Bonnie Gordon Professor of music and member of the Equity Center of the University of Virginia (USA), she moves between different disciplines and artistic practices, focusing her attention on the experience of sound in Renaissance and Baroque compositions and on the affective potential of the voice. She was Visiting Professor at I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Florence). Her latest book, Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds, was published in 2023 by the University of Chicago Press. She plays the viola.
Chiara Guidi Co-founder of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (now Socìetas), a theatre company that since the early 1980s has been at the forefront of the international theatre scene, gaining worldwide recognition, both for its collective work and for the peculiar research between voice and childhood that the artist conducts. The new edition of her La voce in una foresta di immagini invisibili (The Voice in a Forest of Invisible Images) has just been released by the publishing house Nottetempo.
Bruno Lo Turco Professor of Religions and Philosophies of India and Sanskrit Language and Literature at the Italian Institute of Oriental Studies of Sapienza University in Rome. Parallel to his critical and philological studies on ancient texts, he investigates the relationship between modernity and Indian thought and the history of oriental studies. In 2023 he published for Unicopli Il suono della conoscenza: Oralità, scrittura e pensiero in India (The Sound of Knowledge: Orality, Writing, and Thought in India).
Lello Voce Poet, writer, audiovisual author, performer, he is among the European pioneers of spoken word and spoken music and has introduced the poetry slam in Italy. He has collaborated with musicians and multimedia artists creating with them performances, records, and books with audio supports. He was awarded the Naples Award and the National Award “Elio Pagliarani” for Poetry, for the CDBooks Piccola cucina cannibale (Squilibri 2012), with Frank Nemola and Claudio Calia, and Il fiore inverso (Squilibri 2016), with F. Nemola and Paolo Fresu. Since 2021 he has been directing, together with Valerio Cuccaroni, the Argolibri series dedicated to foreign poetry. His Razos – “a book of poetry without poems” – was published in 2022 by La Nave di Teseo.
Ute Wassermann At the center of her research is a continuous exploration of the voice, also through the use of bird calls, lo-fi electronics, resonators, field recordings, everyday objects, acoustic costumes, different types of microphone, and multi-channel spatialisation. Her latest LP releases, Strange Songs (For Voice And Bird Calls) and Chimeric, have been published by the labels Treader and Thin Wrist Recordings. Her concert will inaugurate the second edition of Sussurra Luce at Spazio Murat.
CURATORS
Enzo Mansueto Poet, essayist, literary and music critic, teacher. He has published the poetry books Descrizione di una battaglia (Scheiwiller 1995), Ultracorpi (Edizioni d ‘If 2006) and the audiobook Scassata dentro, with the phonographic poetry collective, La Zona Braille (Edizioni d ‘If 2010). Among his most recent works, the Italian translation and editing of Ruby Cohn’s essay, Beckett: a canon (CUE Press 2024). Author of several academic and journalistic articles, he contributes to the Apulian cultural pages of Corriere del Mezzogiorno. Already the voice and author of the lyrics of the Bari-based post-punk band The Skizo, he told their story in Lumi di punk (Agenzia X 2006). He is on the jury of the poetry with music award “Alberto Dubito”.
Massimo Torrigiani Curator, artistic director, publisher, he directed the Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, chaired the scientific committee of the PAC in Milan, was part of the artistic committee of Triennale Milano Teatro, and directs the Culture Agenda of the Italian Buddhist Union. He directed and co-directed the magazines Rubbia, Boiler, Rodeo and Fantom, and wrote for international catalogues and periodicals. In 2021, through Dischi Fantom, the record company he leads, he created Sussurra Luce with Francesco Cavaliere, a project that between radio, records, installations, and concerts investigates and blurs the boundaries between voice, text, and sound. Since 2023 he has been the artistic director of Angoli, the international arts festival of Spazio Murat.
The Voice as Medium Spazio Murat Curated by Enzo Mansueto and Massimo Torrigiani with Francesco Cavaliere 1 June 2024 spaziomurat.it