GDM: As described it in the curatorial text for the exhibition, for me, Lara and Raffaela’s works are inextricably tied to the sea. I don’t know if I would call that ‘inspiration’, but it is definitely a feeling, an element, a memory, and an experience that had been important in thinking about the exhibition. The sea, the water, the ocean. The sea that is so close to the living room of Raffaela’s flat in Naples and the sea that rushes and roars in the video work Saudade by Lara.
In this context, I have obviously also been thinking about the concept of fluid bodies and about fluidity itself, of existence and coexistence. Astrida Neimani’s text Bodies of Water – Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology accompanied me in this. And: I am writing these thoughts down on the train back to Rome from the Venice Biennale. One thing that has definitely imprinted itself on my mind from all these impressions is the video work Sirens by Nan Goldin. This is not an ‘inspiration’ but a touching re-encounter, which probably also stays with me because I have talked a lot with Lara and Raffaela about the Sirens and all their sisters from ancient mythology.

AFF: The works presented in the show explore the social potential for a more bodily understanding of community care, changing our relationship to listening while focusing on the ways we move through and take up space with others. The result is an enforcing polyphony operating on the sensorial: how did you calibrate this ensemble?

GDM: From my perspective, I can add that in working with Lara and Raffaela, I was fascinated by her different ways and approaches to storytelling. As you rightly point out, Attilia, Raffaela’s stories tend to be linked to objects, whereas Lara’s many stories are manifested in ephemeral movements and voices. At the same time, the works of both artists also feed on their own experiences and biographies. This creates a dense, multifaceted, and multi-layered web of references and connections that is multiplied again through the eyes and experiences of the exhibition visitors.

AFF: Is there any special way in which the artistic dialogue manifests in the exhibition?

GDM: I think for all of us the idea of polyphony and the desire to create a kind of polyphonic sounding space was of great importance. What ‘sounds’ wonderful as an idea and concept (to stay in the corresponding space of meaning) is of course not always easy to actually implement. The question of how we can develop this space of many voices together and how we can give space to all the different voices in the process has been very much on our minds. The result is many-voiced, beautiful, and demanding. The exhibition visitors are invited to dive into this sea of voices with open ears. The sound of Feeling Her Way (2022) resonates within me: the installation by artist Sonia Boyce in the British Pavilion, in which the voices of the invited musicians complement each other in a wonderful way.

AFF: The exhibition changes through time and through the presence or absence of the public. I am thinking of Umberto Echo’s notion of ‘Opera Aperta’, defining works that function as a script, infinitely open to external interpretations. As both your contributions can be activated, would you see the works in the exhibition as ‘opere aperte’? I’d also be curious to understand how you set the parameters of these activations.

LD: ​​

GDM: During the preparations for the exhibition, we actually talked more often about the questions of ‘participation’ by the audience. Umberto Eco’s opera aperta idea is interesting. One of the first projects I was allowed to curate within a (more traditional) institution was a solo exhibition by Franz Erhard Walter, who considers his often textile sculptures as works only completed when activated by the audience. This experience resonates for me, and I think that in contemporary art production today, the questions of participation and accessibility are incredibly crucial, especially in these post-pandemic times.
For me, however, the possibility of activation or participation must always remain an open invitation. Together with the artists, I want to create a space in which there are manifold possibilities of participation and also of interpretation. In Undomesticated Voices, visitors can read Lara’s script, activate Raffaela’s record player, listen, move, stand still. On the level of curatorial mediation, it is therefore important for me to create a narrative that is also open. In the texts I write about the exhibition, I consciously use the first person, the ‘I’: I put my reading of the exhibition up for discussion, I share it and at the same time emphasize that there are many more approaches and strategies of appropriation.

RNR: I’ve been always interested in creating a sort of ambiguity between public participation and performative act, employing them as activation tools in my installation, which stands as a composition of movements and actions that had happened before or are in preparation. As Gioia mentioned, we have had long conversations about public participation and I’ve been wanting to push more strangers to enter the private, almost sacred, dimension I aim to create, but this time it was clear it had to happen as a gentle suggestion through the chaos of many voices. I am not interested in performance as a vertical spectacular presentation, but I envision performance as something that happens in different times and temporalities within or outside the exhibition space: as in a three-week journey; by having the public eat a marzipan coin; by leaving a libretto as an annex to the record including the texts/poems I wrote and we performed during the journey—an ongoing work which will reappear in the next audio and record player presentations; it exists intimately as a secret participatory activation of the space which will become part of a future film. Revelations never arise directly. I have written a little text to accompany the show which asks the public about their desire to enter the space and create a relationship with it. I want everyone to activate the audio which is the core of the installation. Inviting the public to play the record player, a nearly obsolete gesture, creates a relationship with the space and perhaps the memory of a specific time as the one of the audio piece. CET 39°01’31”N 17°12’08”E, (2020-2022) is a sound improvisation made specifically at the Temple of Era di Capo Colonna in Calabria, a striking location where just a pillar is left from the temple; all the marble has been scavenged to build the palazzos of the nearby city. It then connects with the mantra Saremo rocce–Saremmo rocce, extracted from my practice of automatic writing, as the sirens become rocks when they die: all the liminal material contains the hidden sounds of these mistaken voices. Our attempt to chant and declare words of love and caring in these places of extraction and colonization—in order to repair and transform how history is recorded and narrated—materializes in the exhibition as ceramic light holders which contribute to the sounds along the engraved symbols in the extracted marble and the gestures forming a script together with the sea water drawings.

AFF: Lara, can you tell me how the iterative and intimate movements that constitute the performance ‘A score for various paths to a polyphony’—presented every Saturday by a different performer—have originated?

LD:

AFF: The show escapes rationality to welcome the immediacy and fragmentation of poetic and corporal language. Is poetry a source of inspiration in your work? If so, could you share some? 

GDM: Reading always accompanies me. Reading nourishes and heals. In recent months, Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, Annie Ernaux and many others have accompanied me. Right now, however, I cannot name a poem. But I was deeply touched by these (as far as I know, still untranslated) lines by the German author and philosopher Karoline Emcke:

“I write as if I were murmuring: quietly, more to myself than already addressing others. It’s more like thinking with the keyboard. Writing makes you think more precisely. That is intimate. Like whispering. Or just like murmuring. Maybe that’s why I always write barefoot. As if, with feet in shoes, one could only think in conventions.”

RNR: Hard to say one now. I will just quote the title of an Etel Adnan anthology, which is: “To look at the sea is to become what one is”.

LD: Poetry, in the way it is described by Audre Lorde in her essay Poetry is not a luxury (1985), is definitely a source of inspiration and perhaps the core of my practice and work: “I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight  [Audre Lorde, Poetry is not a luxury (1985)].

AFF: If the exhibition were a sound, what would that be?

RNR: The sound of the particles of clay moving with the sounds inside the ceramic light holder, which is very similar to the sound of a delicate fire and again similar to the sound of a distant wave moving together with a Mediterranean breeze.

LD: This is a very difficult question! I am not sure I want it to be one specific sound only, but if it should be, then an archaic and timeless voice, neither male nor female, sounding deep like the ocean and high the wind in the middle of the night.

GDM: I think for me the exhibition IS (also) sound, namely the voice and sounds I hear when I enter the exhibition space. The singing, buzzing, screaming, unpleasant and beautiful voices from Lara’s performances and her video work Saudade, the whispering and crackling and singing voices of Raffaela’s Dubplate, the voices of the sirens and priestesses, the voices of the visitors.