Sonic Topographies of the South

Rural Futurity as Resonance and Dissonance

The Liminaria festival ran for five editions between 2014 and 2018, culminating with a collateral event in Palermo as part of Manifesta 12 (the nomadic European biennial).  Based in the rural territory of Fortore, the frontier between the three regions of Campania, Molise, and Puglia, Liminaria offered residencies and public presentations in which visiting artists worked with local residents to apply sound art methodologies to the unique geographies of this territory. In the 11th episode of the Sound Propositions podcast, curators Beatrice Ferrara and Leandro Pisano reflect upon the successes and challenges of working in the rural south of Italy with virtually no budget, the important solidarities between the south of Italy and the Global South, and their then-recently published “Manifesto of Rural Futurism.”

I later returned to Liminaria as an artist-in-residence in summer 2022, as I wrote about in this newsletter at the time. In between, I wrote the following essay, which was published in Risonanze e Coesistenze. Suono territori e margini, available as an ebook for just € 0,99. Besides myself, other authors include Pietro Bonanno, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Nicola Di Croce, David Mollin & Salomé Voegelin, Alyssa Moxley, and many others, as well as multilingual translations of Leandro and Beatrice’s “Manifesto of Rural Futurism.”

Sonic Topographies of the South: Rural Futurity as Resonance and Dissonance

One of my earliest sonic memories is of the altar bells at Sunday Mass, which as a child I mistook for a literal manifestation of divine presence. And so, the discovery that this joyous sound was performed by those sneaky altar boys is one of my earliest disenchantments.  Nonetheless, the notion that sound makes audible that which is otherwise imperceptible has stayed with me, as has some small hope of re-enchanting the world. Besides, the shared experience of listening to those bells still serves a socially unifying function, creating a commons that easily exceeds the religious.

This capacity that sound has for creating social spaces, for bringing us into relation with one another, remains one of my strongest impressions of Liminaria. “A fieldwork-based research project aimed at developing sustainable cultural, social and economic networks in the Fortore area” of Southern Italy, Liminaria is defined by its relation to place. [1] The Fortore river valley is a micro-region located at the intersection of Benevento, Campobasso, and Foggia, three provinces from three different regions. Far from the urban centers and tourist destinations of the coasts, Fortore offers a very different perspective into Italian life than one normally encounters. While resisting the Romantic clichés and binaries often associated with the concept of “rurality,” Liminaria’s curators nonetheless put the region’s “marginality” at the center of their curatorial mission. And though we can situate Liminaria within a tradition of avant-garde art practice based in the South of Italy, the project is unique in that the curators are themselves of the South, demonstrating a self-reflexivity that has often been missing from past engagements with Southern rurality.

In embracing both the contradictions and potentialities, “sounding out” [2] a space for the resonances and dissonances of Rural Futurism, Liminaria models an approach that is defined by collaboration and dialogue. The sonic spaces opened by Liminaria’s activities are eminently social, yet they also cultivate new means of thinking politically about realities which are otherwise difficult to perceive. This was made clear to me when I visited the Fortore region in June of 2017 during Philip Samartzis’ residency in San Marco dei Cavoti, in which he was making recordings of the region’s many wind turbines. Wind power, I was told, was a rapidly expanding enterprise in the area. Such infrastructure is much less dense on the Great Plains of America, with each windmill a mile apart from its neighbors. But Fortore’s hills and ridges are noticeably crowded with various models. While they are mostly silent unless one stands directly underneath them, the cluster of wind turbines presents as a kind of visual noise. This silent noise is a constant reminder of broken promises, of jobs and financial resources that have yet to benefit the area. But that visual noise is also a symbol of how even that which is most common—the very air—has been transformed into yet another resource to be extracted and exploited.

Samartzis’ activities facilitated the opportunity to have more meaningful conversations with local people about their relationship to the turbines. In the town hall of San Marco dei Cavoti, Samartzis delivered a short public lecture and performance, sharing rough versions of the recordings he’d made during his residency, making audible complex dynamics which would otherwise have gone unnoticed to outsiders. Samartzis brought the sounds of these silent monoliths into the heart of the community, their silence echoing the absence of delivered promises, their transformation into audibility allowing for this very discussion. Samartzis’ recording equipment enacts a process that finds a deeper parallel; the wind is transformed into energy, into power, transferred from rural to urban contexts.

We are often unaware of, or simply take as natural, the ways in which sound structures our lives. Sounds we hear every day often fade into the background of our consciousness, while traveling to unfamiliar places transforms what is mundane into something wondrous. While visiting Muslim countries for the first time, I was especially struck by the sound of the muezzins’ call to prayer, often audible from multiple nearby mosques at once. All those within earshot become members of an audible community, a kind of sphere emanating from each minaret. Even for non-believers, the experience of sound in space is powerful in that it is shared in a way that abstract clock-time is not.

Perhaps church bells play something of an analogous role, synchronizing the social comings and goings, breaking up the day. If in Italy the piazza remains a default place to gather publicly, the church bells extend this potential for gathering, the limits of audibility doubling as the border between inside and outside a given community. The audible range of every church bell is a temporary sonic microcosm of the ancient Roman Vestal Hearth which radiated as a bubble of heat from the earth, stretching to the Rubicon. [3]

As an Italian-American, I was raised in the Catholic church, and despite being a lapsed Catholic, it is perhaps unsurprising that my reflections upon my relationship to sound tends to return to religious examples. But in a majority Catholic country such as Italy, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of the Church’s role in structuring life, be it the layout of a village or the sounds which mark its borders. The force of Catholic tradition is especially strong in the South of Italy, even if it is a land of stereotypically superstitious faith and a syncretic tradition that still often evokes the magical. [4] Even in the cities, from Napoli to Catanzaro to Palermo, one finds endless edicole votive, death announcements, and shrines, one hears the sounds of old women chanting prayers, of mourning rituals, of church music.

The culture of cities has been influenced by waves of migration from rural territories, and the line between urban and rural, like that of north and south, is not drawn so easily. But the Fortore river valley is undeniably rural, and its comuni remote from one another. To get to San Marco dei Cavoti, I took the bus from Napoli to Benevento, where I transferred to a smaller bus in a quiet lot that serves as a sparse de facto bus terminal. Just as we left the edge of Benevento behind, weaving our way through the hill-ways, trails winding but far removed from the age old paths, Franco Battiato’s “Bandiera Bianca” [5] came on the radio, with its instantly recognizable organ melody, trebly bass guitar, and stunted drum beat set against Battiato’s weak voice and vicious wit.

“Oh! how difficult it is to remain calm and indifferent/While everyone around makes noise” [6]

Hearing this line, I can’t help but think about Napoli, the noisy city I’ve left behind on my short trip to the idyllic countryside. The topography of Fortore is far from the postcard views of the coast and the islands, offering neither touristic seaside nor agricultural plain. Many of my own sonic associations with the South of Italy are sounds of the coast: The gentle lull of the sea waves receding against the round stones. The din of birds and cicadas emanating from hills full of olive trees. The daily rhythms of the marina. But other sounds are less particular to the seaside: Footsteps reflected off the stone walls and paths of the dense villages. A motorino speeding down the sole road. The hum of some old engine putting uphill. The vigorous strikes and spins of a calcino match in the youth bar. Cards thrown down on the table by old men during a game of scopa. A meal being prepared in the kitchen, often heard drifting out through the windows above.

Reflecting upon the five editions of Liminaria from 2014 to 2018, shared themes emerge across very different projects: the relationship between people and the land, with nature, with technology, with animals, and with the concept of the future. Despite the remoteness from the coast, I recognize these categories within my own sonic associations. Their resonances form a sonic cartography of the South, revealing intersecting histories, relationships, and forms of life.

In order to better appreciate the diversity of the micro-region of Fortore, curator Leandro Pisano took me to nearby Baselice, along with Luciana Berti, an art historian also visiting from Napoli. We three were very quickly drawn into a conversation with a local family, who recognized that we were visitors and offered us some coffee. A small, elderly man who must have been close to 90 years old insisted on guiding us all over town, pointing out landmarks and explaining the history of the village. Baselice’s construction is all tufo, he repeatedly explained, pointing to the numerous examples of the stone of volcanic ash commonly used in Italy since antiquity. And although I could not follow every word he was saying, I’m certain that he told us of a sorceress and a fairy, who once lived in a grove of trees visible from where we were standing. This fusion of the mundane and the wondrous perfectly encapsulates all the contradictions of this place.

This belvedere, overlooking the intersection of three provinces, is also the site of the monumento ai caduti di Nassirya, a monument to the Italians who died in the 2003 bombing of the carabinieri headquarters in Nasiriyah, Iraq. I don’t know that I would have remembered this fact, except that our anziano guide went on to speak about history more explicitly, recalling the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and “the glorious days” when il Duce redeemed “the national shame” of Italy’s loss at Adua three decades prior. He even began to sing a bit of “Faccetta Nera,” and I had to check with Leandro that be sure I understood the context of what was happening.

“We Black Shirts will avenge / The heroes fallen liberating you!” [7]

This was certainly not the first time I’d heard an older Italian speak fondly of the Fascist era. As I understand it, Fascism’s message in the South of Italy was populist and ruralist, less focused on modernization as it was in the North. A city dweller myself, this equation of rurality and conservatism fit neatly into my stereotypes about isolated areas. And still in the peak years of the migrant crisis, perhaps I should not be surprised to hear elderly rural residents in depopulated villages pine for “the good old days” of order and glory. It wasn’t until later that the irony of this song sung in this context sunk in. While “Faccetta Nera” was meant to inspire a fervor of support for Italian colonialism, it also describes liberating a pretty young Ethiopian girl and bringing her to Rome. It seems to me that villages all over Italy, which have been drastically declining in population as many young people emigrate to the cities or abroad, could be reinvigorated by the migrants and refugees arriving on Italian shores. Instead, these refugees are demonized as “invaders,” as if the peasants of il Meridionale had not themselves constituted the largest voluntary migration in history just a century prior.

“Let's put the shirt back on, times are about to change.” [8]

Battiato’s words echo in my mind, and I remain calm. Is it my place to opine on such matters, in any case? Here I was, an observer walking around in a village that had been nothing but generous to me, with my recorder rolling so as not to miss anything. As a field-recordist, this strikes upon an ethical issue I have struggled with for years, which in turn raises a philosophical consideration. The controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that the essence of technology was Gestell, an enframing or positionality, which is to say that technology provides the framework by which we understand our world. And, for Heidegger, the danger is that everything in that world may become reduced to a “standing-reserve,” waiting to be used or organized. [9] Just as our experience of the world is increasingly mediated through our ubiquitous screens, being a field-recordist means perpetually reducing each lived experience to something to record, or which we have failed to document.

Must field-recordings reduce the world to mere raw material? Focusing on social relations, or even better, using our recordings to engender spaces of exchange and shared listening, may help us to sidestep such a reduction. The voices which we hear in a recording are not necessarily reduced to interchangeable items of inventory. They can be our collaborators, agents in their own right. And certainly, the voices of local people recur in the work of Liminaria’s residents, as in the use of interviews in the work of Alejandro Cornejo Montibeller (2015) or Marco Messina (2018). Still others feature the voice in song, documenting musical performances, as in the work of Gunhild Mathea Olaussen and Helene Førde (2017). The methodology of Liminaria ensured that each artist would work in dialogue with the local inhabitants, each artist creating from a self- reflexive standpoint that begins with their own orientation as outsiders to the region. But while I was in Baselice, walking around with my recorder out, it occurred to me that I have done just the opposite, swooping in for a short visit with a recorder, extracting voices without dialogue or consent.

The use of the voice raises ethical questions of consent most explicitly, since the voice is so strongly linked to individual subjects. But this also grants the voice special significance. In The Force of Listening, Lucia Farinati and Claudia Firth set out to query an ethics of listening, turning their attention to the potential of vocality. [10] They begin to delimit a politics of voices drawing on their conversations with philosophers Nick Choudry (Why Voice Matters) and Adriana Cavarero (For More Than One Voice). For Choudry, speech and the voice are understood as an inherently relational means of subject formation, of giving an account of oneself (and listening to receive an account of another). Cavarero insists upon the uniqueness of each voice, and the meaningfulness of vocality in excess of, or even prior to, speech.

In recording the voice of our impromptu tour guide that day in Baselice, I also registered much more than the content of his words. I am not a native speaker of Italian, so my experience was already mediated by my struggle to understand. Yet listening back on those recordings, I can hear the tufo walls, the open vistas, the friendly faces, and perhaps even begin to perceive time in a less linear fashion. This is very much in the spirit of Rural Futurism, which encourages us to challenge our ways of listening, to reconceive our orientation towards history, and to deconstruct received binary relations.

Rural Futurism is provocative in so far as it puts together two concepts which are so often presumed to be antonyms, and does so in a way that transforms our understanding of both. In Italy, Futurism (and in many ways Modernism itself) is overwhelmingly associated with Fascism and the right-wing (even if there was a “minor” leftist current represented by figures such as Cromatico, Ivo Pannaggi, and Umberto Barbaro). As curator Beatrice Ferrara explains, in evoking “Rural Futurism,” they are aligning themselves with Afrofuturism and other “minor” futurisms, in opposition to an understanding of history rooted in notions of linear progress (the very types of narratives which have contributed to the marginalization of rural territories from the cultural imaginary). [11]

In this imagining, rurality is reconstituted as a site of potential resistance. The South of Italy has a long history of resistance, at least as far as the Sanniti (Samnites) resistance to the expansion of Ancient Rome. One might recall that Tommaso Campanella, the heterodox and utopian thinker famous for his City of the Sun, wrote that famous poetic dialogue from a prison cell, following his attempt to organize an insurrection against Spanish rule in Calabria at the end of the 16th century. Or Masaniello, a young fisherman turned revolutionary who, in 1647, led his own revolt against the rule of Habsburg Spain in Napoli. Or still, the Fasci Siciliani of the late 19th century, whose insurrection against the latifundia system in Sicily is just one of a long history of self-organized tenacity of Southern workers.

Nonetheless, I always find it strange to think of the avant-garde operating in the South of Italy, like “Rural Futurism” a seeming contradiction in terms. While avant-garde artists staging events in the South appeared to be a regular occurrence in the 1960s and 70s, surely the elderly Fascist sympathizer or the rugged traditionalist is much more widespread. Dwelling in this contradiction, defamiliarizing our received notions, is what makes projects like Liminaria so resonant. And it is the legacy of those experimentalists that lives on in the activities of Liminaria.

One such precedent wrestling with this same contradiction can be found in the experiences of the avant-garde British art-rock band Henry Cow, who played in Italy frequently during the 1970s, working “promiscuously for any left-wing party, but especially for the PCI (the Italian Communist Party),” as Georgina Born remembers. Most often they toured performing at the Festa de l'Unità summer festivals in various cities, villages, and towns, “bringing [their] brand of politicised avant-garde rock to the Italian masses, fitting the bill perfectly in the eyes of PCI and other varieties of socialist intellectual with our combination of left-wing lyrics and modernist musical lines.” [12]

Yet their reception varied. Born recalls a particularly difficult audience in Benevento, which happens to be the province where Baselice and San Marco dei Cavoti are situated. The group performed in a ruined amphitheater, but unlike Pink Floyd in Pompeii, the Cow played not for the cameras but for an audience of locals, “mainly Southern Italian farmers and their families out for an evening of conviviality and solidarity.” While the concert began just as so many before, they found that their “‘uncompromising’, atonal compositions” were met with outright hostility. Born’s recollection is backed up by the mixing desk recording of that evening which serves as “testament to the astonishing encounter.”

A couple of minutes after we started to play, a scattering of calls and cries can be heard from the audience; a few more minutes, and a slow hand clap begins, and continues throughout the ninety-odd minutes of our set as the audience of Italian peasants grows in boldness and contempt. The effect is to render as vocal, sonorous, querulous counterpoint their antipathy to the music. There was sonic proof of a negative popular response to our music, and to our musical politics: a telling lesson. [13]

The urbane ensemble’s difficult music was met with a dissonant response. While this is a far cry from the types of collaboration exemplified by Liminaria’s participants, it is nonetheless a strong example of the way sound both brings together and keeps apart, in the audience actively expressing their own discomfort sonically.

Henry Cow performed all over the Italian peninsula, but for others, the South itself was the draw, its rurality and “backwardness” a Romantic site of revolutionary potential. The influential New York theatre troupe the Living Theatre made Italy their home-base for much of their exile in Europe, which lasted from 1963 until 1983. During these decades they performed in the South often, including in Napoli, Cosenza, and Palermo. They had been staying in Cefalù, Sicily at Villagio Magico, an African-jungle-themed resort in its off-season lull, “collectively creating” their most famous work, Paradise Now (1968). That work includes semi-improvised aspects involving audience participation. I hear echoes of this spirit of collective participation, too, in Liminaria’s activities, above all when, in 2016, Miguel Isaza, David Vélez, and Ferdinando Godoy involved an entire town of 2,700 inhabitants to celebrate a 73-year-old bell player, the last to assume this traditional role. The trio organized a parade of people and animals that Leandro describes as a “sonic procession” of peeling bells, following a bell concert at the Chiesa San Filippo, in Roseto Valfortore. [14] Liminaria positions these artists in explicit dialogue and collaboration with local inhabitants, histories, and sonic spaces.

While the Living may have included local actors, and performed in spaces that emphasized direct encounters with the public, it might be argued that their process of collective creation took place while sequestered in an Orientalist fantasy rather than in proper dialogue with their surroundings. Another experimental theatre troupe, Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret, also found their defining direction while living in the South of Italy, but did so in a way that, like Liminaria, explicitly foregrounded the act of exchange. In the spring of 1974, Barba took his company from Denmark to his homeland of Puglia, where the group inaugurated their “open period” and pioneered their bartering performances, based on a dynamic of exchanges rather than of audience-performer. These barter performances emphasized relationships, contact, and circulation rather than exhibiting a reified work. The work of the Living and of Odin Teatret were dependent on the participation of their audiences, a legacy of exchange and openness within which I situate Liminaria.

Artists who work in this tradition, whether today or in decades past, resist the traditional confines of “a work of art” in order to foreground a different relationship to the world, often ‘activating’ the allegedly passive spectator as a part of the realization of the work itself. The South of Italy, constructed as such in both the Italian and foreign imagination as a “backwards” place— imagined to be closer to the past or to the Orient or to Africa than to modern Europe—often becomes a site of mythopoesis, a place that ‘modern’ artists can perform to show that they are opposed to the aesthetic values of our consumerist society. The Southern peasant, the farmer, the villager, becomes a kind of arbiter not of tradition but of a counter-current to the ravages of capitalist modernity.

Alvin Curran, an American composer based in Rome since 1964, had his own transformational experience in a small town in Puglia. Best known as a founding member of the pioneering ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva, Curran is an avid field-recordist, and his solo works of the 1970s foreground his use of magnetic tape in performative contexts. He has written about the intense affirmation he found in the positive reaction of an old man in a small coastal town somewhere in Puglia.

What he told me is something I will never forget: “I don’t know what you call this, what you just played, I don’t even know what these instruments are, but I want to tell you that for me...it was music, yes, music...” I understood he was saying this not only in his own name but in the name of the small town and its archaic hospitality to a complete stranger which he wished to convey. At the time this kind of pre-industrial curiosity and deep rustic ethos made Italy, to us outsiders, an exotic land of cultured peasants—they knew the operas inside out—and while this tradition and its dialects are succumbing to the brute forces of TV and contemporary life in general, memories and remnants of it still pop up in Italian avant-garde works, alongside references to Homer, Plato, or Ovid. [15]

Quite to the contrary of Henry Cow’s dissonant reception in Benevento, Curran work resonated within this rural space. His obscure work was received with warm encouragement, with face-to- face dialogue and exchange. For Curran, the seeming contradictions of these coexistent forces were precisely what made the South so full of potential.

The short-lived musical “super-group” Telaio Magnetico (which included future superstar Battiato, whose music accompanied me on my bus journey) played concerts in cities throughout the South (in Reggio-Calabria, in Gela, Sicily, and also in Rome) during their sole tour, organized by the Radical Party in support of the legalization of cannabis in 1975. In their name, Magnetic Frame, we find a means to triangulate with Heidegger’s Gestell and Liminaria’s emphasis on rurality as positionality. This little-known tour has all but been forgotten, and yet it continues to resonate to this day, a legacy which Liminaria has continued in their efforts to share a different mode of listening to the topographies of the rural south.

Such experiences as I’ve described above were made possible in part because of the support of the institutional Left parties, which by the 1970s had made culture an important part of their political programmes. The Communists, the Radicals, the Socialists, and others funded a variety of avant-garde cultural projects to reach those often uneducated and isolated members of Italian society who had typically been written off as conservative. Today, the political landscape has undoubtedly shifted, and such institutional support is a rare thing indeed, and yet Southerners continue to demonstrate just how resourceful and creative they can be even in the absence of such patronage. Organized by locals who bring artists from abroad (or even just from the North) to the South, Liminaria might best be understood as carrying on this legacy, the continuous struggle of sounding out a future in free relation to its past.

During his residency in San Marco dei Cavoti, Phillip Samartzis’s recordings reframed the question of wind power for locals and outsiders alike. While a wind farm might initially appear to be an unequivocal good, the reality is more complicated, particularly as promised benefits for the local residents have yet to materialize. And while wind turbines may seem to be entirely oriented towards the future, the wind is in fact deeply tied to the area’s history. The province of Benevento’s namesake fair winds [16] have been harnessed by e·on, a German company that is one of the world’s largest investor-owned electric utilities. Samartzis’ recordings of the wind turbines sounded out the town hall that evening, creating an opportunity to productively inhabit an ambivalent feeling-in-common with these larger social forces. These are the spaces Liminaria keeps open, spaces in which contradictions can coexist alongside us. Like the altar bells of my youth, the sound of the wind turbines serves a socially unifying function. But rather than be disenchanted by the sleight of hand, the mechanism is one instead of revelation.

Joseph Sannicandro
February 2020

Footnotes

[1] Liminaria, “The Project,” http://www.liminaria.org/en/project/

[2] Cf. Samuel R. Galloway and Joseph Sannicandro, “Queer Noise: Sounding the Body of Historical Trauma,” in Toward Gender Equality in the Music Industry: Education, Activism and Practice. Sarah Raine and Catherine Strong, Eds. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019)

[3] Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, (1998) Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Wieland Hoban, Trans. (Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2011)

[4] Cf. Ernesto de Martino, (1959) Sud e magia. (Milano: Feltrinello, 1982); Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic, (London: Bloomsbury, 2018)

[5] “White Flag”

[6] “Uh! com’è difficile restare calmi e indifferenti/ Mentre tutti intorno fanno rumore”

[7] “Vendicheremo noi Camicie Nere/ Gli eroi caduti liberando te!”

[8] “Rimettiamoci la maglia i tempi stanno per cambiare”

[9] Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Edited by David Farell Krell. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)

[10] Lucia Farinati and Claudia Firth, Eds. The Force of Listening. (Errant Berlin: Bodies Press, 2017)

[11] Sound Propositions podcast, “Episode 11: Rural Futurism,” 2019.

[12] Georgina Born, liner notes, The Henry Cow 40th Anniversary Box Set, 2009. 36.

[13] Georgina Born, liner notes, The Henry Cow 40th Anniversary Box Set, 2009. 37.

[14] Sound Propositions podcast, “Episode 11: Rural Futurism,” 2019.

[15] Alvin Curran, “Permesso di Soggiorno: an opera in several acts,” in Live in Rome. (Milan: Die Schachtel, 2010)

[16] Benevento: bene + vento, good or fair wind.