Soundscape

Terra Asciutta (Dry Land)

2020

© Adrian Melis  

Presented in 2020 at the Augusteo Aqueduct of Serino in Rione Sanità, Naples, Dry Land is a performative and site-specific project conceived by Cuban artist Adrian Melis in collaboration with the local community. Employing foley art, the artist and participants skillfully (re)evoke the presence of the water that once coursed through the now-disused aqueduct, using an array of everyday objects to generate sounds. Presence and absence, contemplative function versus productive function, past materiality, and present immateriality are among the elements that distinguish this work, seamlessly aligning with Melis' artistic and sociopolitical practice.
In Dry Land, the power of sound as a social adhesive between a territory (or its remnants) and its inhabitants emerges with crystal clarity. Melis' sound installation serves as a vessel for collective memory, not passively received from the past, but consciously chosen in the present. The intangibility of the sounds, though not yielding a tangible product, effectively reactivates new processes of identity construction. Hands and objects thus become unexpected acoustic entities, assuming the roles of protagonists in a collective concert. Within each individual sound creation, people make choices on how and which aspects of themselves, their traditions, and their past values to transmit and perpetually revive.

https://vimeo.com/494837110

Courtesy: Collezione Anna e Francesco Tampieri

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