Leandro Pisano: The Third Soundscape
ArtistTalk @MoTA LAB
26 April at 7 pm
MoTA LAB, Celovška 42b
The creative re-discovery of exploration through sounds opens up new spaces for reflection on the processes of deep transformation occurring to territories and landscapes today. Sounds can help to decolonize our gaze and reveal geographies and spaces which are hidden in the surface of modernistic maps, falling apart the authorised combination of materials, unlocking the soundscape as an archive in which documents, voices, objects and silences are scattered. Western culture has produced abandoned ruins and deterritorialised places and it is necessary to come to terms with these places out of place, interrogating their unknown and hidden stories, listening to them with the sense of anticipation that migrants have.
So being present in the place and its world means to experiment a different gaze on the neighbouring space, a slow gaze that goes along with an intimate journey corresponding to calling into question of oneself. This presentation will examine some concrete practices developed during a series of projects (Interferenze new arts festival, Liminaria, Calitri Temporary Orchestra, Barsento Mediascape) aiming at the exploration of abandoned and rural places through sound. It will focus on how these practices can open up rare aesthetic spaces, creating a different sense of place that has more to do with experience: sonic explorations of place as a social and political construction. All of the works developed during these projects demonstrate how much sound art and field recording practice take us deep into the layers of image and language in order to “transmit[s] a powerful sense of spatiality, atmosphere and timing” as Peter Cusack puts it.Leandro Pisano is a curator, writer and independent researcher who is interested in intersections between art, sound and technoculture. The specific area of his research deals with political ecology of rural, marginal and remote territories.
He is founder and director of Interferenze new arts festival (2003) and frequently he is involved in projects on electronic and sound art, including Mediaterrae Vol.1 (2007), Barsento Mediascape (2013) and Liminaria (2014-18). Among the sonic arts exhibition he has curated, there are “Otros sonidos, otros paisajes” (MACRO Museum – Rome, Italy, 2017) and “Alteridades de lo invisible” (Festival Tsonami, Valparaíso, Chile, 2018). He conducted presentations, conferences and workshops in different universities or during events related with new media aesthetics, design, sound and territorial regeneration processes in several countries worldwide. He is author of the book “Nuove geografie del suono. Spazi e territori nell’epoca postdigitale”, published in Milan by Meltemi (2017). Leandro Pisano holds a PhD in Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies from University of Naples “L’Orientale”, where he is a member of Center for Postcolonial and Gender Studies (CSPG). He is presently Honorary Research Fellow in Intercultural Relations with the United States at University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”.www.leandropisano.it
