Per-sonare
In ancient times, the theatrical mask, apart from defining the role of the actor, foremost was a voice amplifier (persona, from the Latin verb personare, literally ‘sounding through’). Later the term persona took on a political meaning as it came to stand for the roles subjects represent in civic trials. It thus becomes an object embodying a language of identification in the formalised exchange with the other; an authorised staged performance of the voice.
In today’s reality, where technological mediation has become the dominant bio-political form, the language of architecture, as form of spatial power and definition, becomes increasingly invisible and loses significance. The possibility of creating resistance within the liminality of its spaces equally diminishes.
Technologies such as radio, enable disembodied voices to a remote sensing. Such potential becomes amplified within the ephemerality of infrastructural space. There it is caught between the anxiety of a collective responsibility and the isolation the immediate surrounding poses. The language adopted to confront this actuality reinforces our sense of displacement, leading to disruptive dialogues.
The project explores a notion of spatiality that enables the sound of voices to become the reference for a generative language and to embody the global anxiety with the specificity of the local. The sound design, the resonance and echoes of voices in dialogue with each other’s and the surroundings, activates the space. The live dimension of movements crossing the acoustic environment constantly regenerates its spatial definition as it unfolds in the liminality of the sonic space.
The installation is composed by three elements: the main audio, a contextualising landscape and a rationalisation of the audio design through a visual-spatial language.
The sound follows the principle of frequency modulation, using the audible range to human hears. Audio frequencies of different wave amplitude, from the short (17mm) to the longer ones (17m), become the carriers of these sound, amplifying and interfering their transmission, both in terms of time and distance. From the intimacy of the immediate to the overwhelming sounds of planetary radio.
The bodies are invited to respond to these acoustic inputs, by navigating the space, with their own pace, as an autonomous audience and through these movements, spontaneously, they define the thresholds of their presence.
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What kind of place are you now occupying? What kind of confrontation generates this sonic space against the identity of each person approaching this momentum pervaded by constantly moving sources?
It is a reflection over the fact that if planetary radio sounds differently, consequently the way we physically move across the spaces can be different and unlinked from the geopolitical references already dominating the actual world. The control of the electromagnetic sphere is a reinforcement of those power structures taking advantage of commodificable natural resources, a projection of power dynamics that limits once again the rights to access the publicity of those resources.
Experimenting with curiosity alternative principle of architectural language can introduce a new light over those practices dominating our spatial epistemology, finding new tools for resistance for the public interest within the invisible.
