Ear Bodies, Ear Lines

Fabrizio Manco, The Acoustic Vanishing Point 1, 2005, drawing. Courtesy the artist.

Fabrizio Manco, The Saint (The Crow), 1998/1999, site-specific performances, Italy/UK. Photo: Fabio Pino. Courtesy the artist.

A seminal piece which is a condensed image of my work dealing with landscape and environmental ecology. This work has been explored in different media, from drawing, painting, film, video, and site-specific performances in Italy & England (1998) and in India (1999). The impetus came from the imagined sound of crows in Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Cornfield with Crows and, a year later, was linked to the actual sound of crows encountered in India, The Crow (The Saint). This work also related to the agricultural and “iconoclastic” gesture of burning fields of corn and wild oats to regenerate the soil, a typical practice in my native area.

Other PAJ features in the ongoing series “Performance Drawings”—

1. 1. “Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland and Maria Del Bosco,” by Richard Foreman, PAJ 90 (September 2008).

2. 2. “Geneva, Handfall,” by Trisha Brown, PAJ 89 (May 2008).

3. 3. “The Threepenny Opera,” by Robert Wilson, PAJ 88 (January 2008).

4. 4. “Research Events,” by Ralph Lemon, PAJ 81 (September 2005).

5. 5. “Studio as Study,” by Melinda Barlow, PAJ 71 (May 2002).

In my work I seek to provide a framework in which spaces can resound with bodies through hearing and listening, and where they can also interweave their particular social and cultural aspects. I engage in performative investigations into aurality in connection with architecture (spaces to play within and be played by) and the natural and urban environment (including the natural within the urban). These are sometimes affected by my own cultural perspective, that of a Southern Italian who has been resident in the UK for eighteen years. This ecology between spaces, the environment, and bodies reaches out to inform the understanding of cross-cultural site-specificity, performance, and embodied awareness. For me, this is an arena for communal and sustained sharing that develops a relationship beyond what we are already able to experience and hear. A different approach from established categorizations of the sonic, it works towards an interrogation of sound within performance art. This would also provide a way to speak of artistic and pedagogical means of intervention in what are often rigid categorizations of sound, performance, and place.

Through my condition of chronic tinnitus and hyperacusis, I have come to realize how much sound and movement are intermingled and mutually generative. Over time, I have become more aware of this interaction, and the response and accommodation of it within performance training/pedagogy and practice, which produce a reflection and a re-listening with a posthumous ear. I settle with my invisible and constant “companion,” with its hyperactivity of neurons and thoughts, searching for a world of acoustic resonance and a “silent” place. So, sound chose me, in my attempt to live outside my ears and through my ears. And I, with time, chose sound: it was simply a search for the silence that sound is.

The flattening effect of an apparent acoustic separation with the world and the bringing back of hearing patterns, the existent acoustic, and my “stretched” experience of space became my work, providing a condition and possibility for creating a new context. My whole body is called upon when a question of hearing and listening arises; it invests me. Sound intrudes in me, traumatizes and sometimes disturbs me, pleases, hurts, and owns me, but I cannot own sound. My personal experience and spatial positioning, which is that of also being a member of the audience and a spectator of performance, produces particular reflections.

In summer, in beholding the woods of my native region (the Salento area of Puglia in Italy), I constantly find myself surrounded and surprised by a thousand cicadas, an experience similar to the image of shimmering light on the surface of the sea. It is, indeed, a sea of noise: a change of sound frequency and a pure tone which is hard to locate, rattling...