Percorsi sonori in Europa: cartografie critiche dell’ascolto

Sound, even beyond a purely musical approach, can be considered an element based on a strong relational and associative potential, which empowers cross-cultural relation – enhancing encounters and forms of cultural translation; configuring a practice of border crossing; re-routing the discourse on gender, race and difference; and making new sense of concepts such as “identity” and “community”

Dealing with the investigation of a specific case study, that is the European network of sound art residences SoCCoS (Sound of Culture – The Culture of Sound), this article highlights how aesthetic practices related to sound, within an associative network based on an ‘other’ ecological perspective, can open “liminal spaces that disturb the historical stability of the landscape” (Stirling, 2013), configuring a critical cartography that exceeds the authorized vision of history, politics and culture .

In this sense, whether we think of Europe as a historical, political, geographical or affective concept, sound becomes one of the possible reading (or rather ‘listening’) keys to reaffirm the urgency of reconfiguring its notion, to listen to the ruins it has produced through the creation of unequal categories and regimes of human ’rights’, citizenship and hospitality.

By critically crossing the diverse cultures that result from the varied sounds and histories of sound in a European context, we can create the conditions within which to make other positions perceptible – not by adhering to every utopian notion of connectivity and borderlessness, but by highlighting the dyssymmetries and tensions produced by the listening process. In this way, sound can reveal invisible relationships and movements between objects, bodies and matter, inviting us to practice and imagine other possible truths, narratives and ’reality’.