Hummingbirds fly upwards

‘Hummingbirds fly upwards’, in Risonanze e Coesistenze. Suono, territori e margini, Leandro Pisano e Beatrice Ferrara eds, co-authored with David Mollin, Italy: Book Republic, 2022, pp. 109-133

This text is a thinking through, after the event, of the work made from the recordings produced in Guardia Sanframondi, Southern Italy, during the Liminaria/Transitions residency in Summer 2018. It tries to make sense of and narrate the method devised to approach a town that represents a boundary and limit to what we know and yet is home and entirely familiar to those who live in it. Thus this text writes around the attempt of seeing the place rather than its otherness. And it describes the traversing of the unfamiliar, that is ours rather than the town’s, without being distracted by the dichotomy of belonging and what we think we know to see. It does so by closing one’s eyes and taking the experience into one’s hands, into the knuckles and fingertips, that the work records, tapping and scraping along walls that assume a boundary that is however blurred in the bright light of the midday sun. These sounds make a map that does not represent the place but hears and feels it. Thus it connects the interior to the exterior without a centre, in favour of a different imaginary, pressed against the skin and against architecture that dissolves into its experience.