The Third Soundscape

The creative re-discovery of exploration through sounds opens up new spaces for reflection on the processes of deep transformation occuring 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.

The projects of sound artists such as Peter Cusack, Enrico Ascoli, Fabio Lattuca and Pietro Bonanno aim at the exploration of abandoned places through sound. They 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 these works demonstrate how much field recordings 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.

Third Text 29 (1-2)
Londra: Routledge, 75-87
English, ISSN 0952-8822
peer reviewed