Wavelenght

Sound art work temporarily hosted in the Garden of Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo, Venice, 2017

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The wavelength is that of sound and chants, the one of the sea that surrounds Venice and that baths the walls around the old garden where we are. Different wavelengths overlap in the enclosed garden environment and become echoes of life reminiscences.

The installation reproduces the songs and stories of the elderly guests of this rest home as their last fragments of memory. The project was born thanks to a case told by Oliver Sacks in “The man who mistook his wife for a hat“, is the story of two elderly women with a neurological disorder that manifests itself with the incessant reproduction of childhood songs that they feel as coming from inside their heads, with extreme vividness although they are partially deaf. In some cases the memory can bring to light just towards the end of existence what was believed to have forgotten, the short circuit indicates clearly that everything is recorded in our minds. While asking to myself what could happen in their minds, as I walked among the trees of the garden, I was suggested by two images of this place: the first is the garden itself, a closed and protected place, the metaphor of the soul as we find in Fedro by Plato and the mystics Christians (the experience that cultivates our minds, life that plants in time the seeds that will form the private place of our memories); the second are the waves of the lagoon on which the garden opens, which binds to an image that comes from recent neurosciences: the psyche as a set of waves and oscillations. The purpose of the installation is to combine the two images into a sound-driven path of four major rates, which personifies, or perhaps shapes, the voices of the senior guest of the institute. The women we are listening to are mostly affected by severe dementia or Alzheimer, or had a stroke. With the educator Elisa Garato we’ve let them listen to old songs, which in turn brought to light fragments, and in some cases entire songs of their youth, whose memory has remained unchanged over the years and despite memory disorders. This kind of music therapy has reawakened some of them, urging others to sing songs, and in general has helped to recreate a bond between these older women, who, if left alone, tend to argue with each other or to close themselves.

The spectator is invited to walk through space by listening to the cyclical running of these sound memories fragments.