Alessandra Eramo:
LA SANTA MONICA
Sound Performance, 2022
Voice, field recordings, text, microphones, sea salt, drawings, objects
Performed at: KORA Contemporary Arts Center, Castrignano De’ Greci, Puglia, Italy
Group Exhibition “Parla del tuo villaggio” 21. July – 18. November 2022
Voice, mystery and the magical interpretation of sounds heard from the balcony and from the street are at the core of “La Santa Monica”, an ancient ritual of divination in Puglia in southern Italy, practised by Alessandra Eramo’s great-grandmother. A dog’s barking, the whistle of a distant train, the cry of an owl, the voice of people walking down the street, all sounds heard are signs revealing a destiny. Activating the memory of this archaic practice of invocation and interpretation of the reality, Eramo’s sound performance aims to create a profound collective listening experience through the use of voice, field recordings, electronics, text, drawing and sea salt. In the Performance, salt, a rough-sounding purifying element, is transformed into a sound object, evoking the sound of sea water as a distant memory. The recordings she made during her residency in Castrignano De’ Greci – primarily the ubiquitous birds chants, which is a sign of nature’s reconquest of the village, women’s stories about the birds, as well as Eramo’s singing form together a new soundscape in a collage of hypnotic noises. The voice becomes a space between the public and the private, between the distant and the near, between the inside and the outside. The body is exposed in a ritual “on the threshold”, in stasis and in movement, creating a circular itinerary surrounded by drawings/musical scores, transcriptions of the sounds recorded and listened to. Through her performance work, Alessandra Eramo carries on her current research on topics of the body and the margin, the voice and the listening experience between the inside and the outside.
Produced by RAMDOM
Supported by Musikfonds e.V. The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media
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Video documentation by Gabriele Albergo, Wendelin Büchler