TRENTASEI+DUE

Milano (2017)

An audio collection developed during an residency in Milan unfolds as a dense, layered exploration of place, movement, and perception. The work draws from a series of recordings gathered across the city: covered markets alive with overlapping voices and mechanical rhythms; the reverberant expanse of the Duomo; the intimate, almost claustrophobic acoustics of the Ossuary of San Bernardino; the constant flux of Stazione Centrale and the more transient, transitional atmosphere around Gioia.

Further trajectories extend along the Navigli, where water, nightlife, and passing conversations merge into fluid sonic textures, and into the quieter, more peripheral stretch of the Naviglio Martesana. The temporal dimension is marked by the Chinese New Year celebrations, where ritual, crowd density, and intermittent bursts of sound introduce discontinuities into the broader urban soundscape.

The collection navigates a deliberately tangled narrative structure, operating at the threshold between data gathering and environmental recording. It resists linear documentation, instead embracing fragmentation, overlap, and ambiguity. Minimal instrumental interventions—sparse, almost incidental—are interwoven with the field recordings, echoing the tradition of musique concrète while avoiding overt compositional dominance.

Walking becomes both method and framework: recordings are captured in motion, during pedestrian trajectories that function as informal mappings of the city. These mappings are not cartographic in a conventional sense but emerge as experiential traces—acoustic imprints shaped by proximity, direction, and duration. The result is a sonic archive that oscillates between documentation and interpretation, where spatial awareness and narrative complexity remain in constant negotiation.

Additional recordings in Gorla, Gorgonzola, Precotto and Pavia, for a purely numerical reason. Absence of reflective surfaces but openings, cuts, slits structural humidity impossible to remain upright without support elbows as provisional pillars progressive dilution day after day loss of axis of rigidity liquid moving away not a flow rather a slow subtraction drop drop drop minimal persistence silent erosion.