Liminaria: Experimenting with Sonic Translation within Rural Space in Southern Italy

Rural places rediscover, through sound art narratives, trace of paths that exceed the vision of a territory fixed in its marginality, in striving for the recovery of an active force that diverts the gaze beyond any instrumental and rational view. In the folds of these spaces, we can hear the echo of a pulsating cultural fabric, that resonates with forgotten, neglected or removed stories.

Other narratives, which fill with new meanings even concepts like ‘tradition’ that, removed from the role of property simulacrum, instead becomes dynamic part of the flow of translation, transformation, transit that returns as an underground river, latent but indelible, of the unconscious.

This article analyses a series of artistic and sonic practices developed during Liminaria, a fieldwork-based research platform aimed at developing “sustainable” cultural, social and economic networks in the Fortore area, a rural micro-region in the province of Benevento, Southern Italy- Liminaria is one of the possible results of these aesthetic processes mediated by sound, expressed in terms of a project that reflects and transmits not only aspects of collective and individual memories of a rural region, but also new experiences and habits.

In terms of a complex system that conveys ideas and bodies, by connecting different spaces and times, contemporary languages and traditions, the rural territory thus overcomes the limits of the map and its representation. Reconfigured, in a foucaultian sense as an heterotopic device, it suggests different ways to experience the history and culture, to practice the time and space in peripheral places of modernity. From this perspective other narratives arise, to the extent that the sounds produced by the artists with the local community brings out – through a temporary translation process – fragments of a past that opens to the dynamic and unpredictable trajectories of the present, fueling a process in which, starting with the revision of the current, it”s possible to re-imagine (and re-occupy) the rural territory as a “different landscape“.” (p. 37)

Melbourne: RMIT Design Hub Gallery, 33-37
Exhibition/catalogue curated by Madelynne Cornish and Philip Samartzis
English