Danae welcomes back two artists well-known in the field of sound experimentation who have long been working together: Attila Faravelli, sound artist and electro-acoustic musician whose interests range from field recording, performance, workshops to design, and Enrico Malatesta, percussionist and independent researcher whose experiments merge music, performance and territorial surveying.
A project created especially for Danae Festival, Ònfalo takes their sound research to the field of biotremology, an experimental branch of entomology making use of state-of-the-art technology to study the natural sound landscape based on the vibrations it contains.
It is with a sense of nearly incredulous wonder that we listen to the ways things around us keep vibrating even when they seem still; insects communicate by beating plants with their feet, and a blade of grass in a meadow is a babel of unintelligible languages, a musical instrument that keeps playing even when no one plays it, our voices make leaves vibrate, the daily motions of our bodies such as walking and breathing provoke earthquakes on the frailest structures.
An essential contribution to this research came from Juan Lopez, a researcher of the Department of Organisms and Ecosystems Research of the National Institute of Biology of Ljubljana (Slovenia). Lopez studies vibrational communication in arthropods and is a pioneer in the study of vibrational sound landscape.
Thanks to this collaboration and an artistic residency in Milan, the three researchers were able to collect the project’s working materials in the city’s green areas with sophisticated instruments, provided by the University of Ljubljana, that enable to record the vibrational communication in arthropods.
Ònfalo reveals how a scientific detection device, conceived to objectify reality, can paradoxically challenge the very distinction between subject and object, humankind and nature, activity and passivity, showing how a landscape is not so much an object to contemplate, detached from us, as an endless flow of matter and energy we are immersed in and part of.