Italian Tech Week is from 27 to 29 September at the OGR in Turin, Corso Castelfidardo 22. The event is free upon registration on the website italiantechweek.com. At the same link you can purchase the ticket for the M2o Closing Party.
Chiara Luzzana’s performance is on September 29th in Sala Fucine at 12.30pm.
She locked herself in an anechoic chamber, a place without echoes and reverberations. Completely in the dark. She wore eight microphones that she built herself, like stethoscopes. She placed eight more in the room. She stayed there for two hours. She sitting, standing, lying down. She recorded over 500 noises. The heartbeat, the sound of the circulatory system. The one of the eyelids closing, the one of tears. Her breathing. Belly sounds. The stomach. She then entered the recording studio, she created a hierarchy between sounds and composed music. The soundtrack of her body. She is Chiara Luzzana, one of the most innovative “noiseteller” and sound designers in the world. And her artistic project is called Bodiescape, from bodies + soundescape.
“Which means soundscape, because everything that exists in life is soundscape.”
What is the meaning of this artistic project?
“Prove that the body is a perfect musical instrument. And that learning to tune ourselves allows us to live a better life.”
Locked in a room, in the dark, in absolute silence for hours, what experience was it?
“Entering it is a bit like dealing with your own emotional emptiness. The room amplifies your thoughts. You feel naked. Many call it a room of madness. At a certain point, I lost my balance. I started to feel a river in the distance, it was my circulatory system. There was the sound of a drum wrapped in cotton. It was playing wildly, it was my heart. My insides felt like a volcano erupting.”
What were you looking for when you entered?
“I was looking for the breathing of my father, who died of Covid three years ago. It is the last sound I heard from him. It remained with me, inside. I hoped to find it again. Instead I heard my breathing sounding together with that of my father and my mother. She is my source of inspiration. It was a unique symphony. I felt part of a bigger project. And in those hours, I felt my body was so useless. It’s as if I understood that there is much more beyond life. And as this thought became awareness, I cried for joy. The joy of living”
What do tears sound like?
“There is no more beautiful sound than a tear running down your face, it feels like a caress. It comes to give you strength and make you feel that you are there and will be. To make you understand that you are part of something bigger. I was looking for the sound of my soul…”.
Did you find it?
“I don’t know what the soul sounds like, but I’m sure I came close. I believe that in that place, I transcended body and spirit, almost reaching a state of absolute meditation, managing to perceive sounds that I would never have thought of in the life”
You are a “noiseteller” and sound designer, how did you come up with a job?
“I was born a musician then I decided to overturn everything. For years I have been working with noise and transforming it. I have traveled the world with special microphones and created the soundtrack for 21 cities. Zurich, Venice, Tokyo, New York, Milan, Shanghai. I recorded the sound of the Chamber of Deputies. The sound of innovation. The ticking of the keyboard, the push of notifications, the noise of Olivetti machines, the interference from the radio, that from the TV. I played the soundtrack of well-known brands. I locked myself in Swiss bunkers for months to play the music of a watch company. I went to the plantations of Brazil to record the sound of a coffee bean. So I invented a job…”.
What lesson did he learn?
“If you can transform noise into music, it means that you can do anything in life. When I go to places like these, purely scientific ones, and say: I would like to create an artistic project to give importance to what is not audible, I find people with an incredible sensitivity. Which participates in and enriches my desire to create art. Which ultimately has only one mission: to educate us in listening…”.
How do we train ourselves to listen?
“We must learn to stop, not to be afraid of silence and the emotional void it generates. Silence makes a negative judgment we have about ourselves resonate within us. But true silence only exists in an anechoic chamber. Our body is sound It’s music, it’s something beautiful. We need to be aware of it. And take care of it.”