Rural.scapes laboratories: Brazil and Italy

MIS – Museu da Imagem e do Som
São Paulo
28th of March, 2014

March 2014

As part of the rural.scapes – laboratory in residence program, rural.scapes have the pleasure to invite the italian curator and researcher Leandro Pisano to share his experiences in an open conversation at MIS – Museu da Imagem e do Som auditorium, São Paulo.

rural.scapes – laboratory in residence is a rural residence program that focuses on research, articulation, reflection and transdisciplinary artistic practices and critical production in the rural environment, and on the revaluation of the countryside through a review of our notions of individual and collective identity in terms of territory. These actions stimulate the development of projects that promote new productive networks and alternative micro-economies, making the region more self-sustaining and fostering new creative dialogues between city and countryside.

Leandro Pisano works on the Leftover Storytelling, narrating rural territory through (sound) art in the post-digital age.

In this lecture, he delves into some themes of his research on exploration of rural territory through sound and new media art, which has been developed since 2003.

Rural areas, that often suffer for competitive disadvantages in terms of infrastructures, services, knowledge and opportunities, are anyway characterized by strongly connotative elements such as living sustainability and cultural identity.

In the time of crisis, we can see the emergence of a new cultural value, hoping it would bring a new economical value. If the “artists can be possible triggers of the interaction for the future culture and society” (Yukiko Shikata), experiencing the rural world could lead us to a possible future through redesigning the local region and nature in relation to art, sound and media technology.
This conference session will examine some concrete sound and new media art practices.

We see how landscapes and traditions of a rural territory become signals of a different way of experiencing those same places that are marginalized in the development process of contemporary western society, but which indeed own a sustainable heritage either from a cultural and environmental point of view.

From Interferenze new arts festival to Click’n’Food, from Suoni dal Confine to the Barsento Mediascape project, the speaker analyzes how exploring rural context through sound and new media art does not only mean to look at a frozen frame of reality, but to deal with enlarging our vision of the “places outside the place”.

Focusing on these marginalized areas can lead us to a different sense of experiencing the local territory, taking out from the drifts and the folds of the borders an alternative and sustainable way of approaching (and reappropriating) the rural landscape in the postdigital era.

link rural.scapes page