How does proximity emerge in our digital present? How do we hear, how do we feel ourselves via the glossy surface of our screens? Sentimi. Hear me. Feel me. The artist Delphine Chapuis Schmitz has developed the digital project sentimi for Istituto Svizzero. The artistic intervention consists of a series of audio pieces that can be heard—preferably with headphones—on the institute’s website from September 16. The result is a poetic composition of partially appropriated texts, which also plays with the institute’s multilingual website. The voice addresses us directly, there is an ‘I’ and a ‘you’, we hear fragments and words in Italian, French, German, and English, breath and sound. sentimi asks about the possibilities of the real and virtual, of the imaginary and imagined encounters in today’s world. Delphine Chapuis Schmitz also deals with the real absence of bodies on the one hand, on the other, the immediate, material, even physical presence of language(s), the voice. With headphones in our ears we hear and feel this voice, this body—and all of a sudden, they are very, very close and the encounter is perhaps real.

The audio pieces which compose the artistic intervention are available here.