Multispecies Andante Score
Description:
The works by Marzia Migliora (1972, Alessandria; lives and works in Turin) offer a critical representation of the effects a fossil fuel-based economy has on our planet, showing how the human quest for progress directly conditions the damaged contemporary ecologies. The environmental sound installation Partitura multispecie andante (A walking pace multispecies score)–compiled in collaboration with foley artists from the historic Marinelli Cinema Sound Effects Studio in Rome–gives a soundtrack to the ISPRA Collections. Evoking the soundscapes produced by human beings by imitating the sounds of nature, the installation not only replays the original echo of the millions of lives entrapped in these fossils, rocks, and minerals that exist now only as specimens in a museum, but it also reaffirms the extent to which humans are inextricably bound to the planet’s other living species. Divided into three movements, accessible via QR code, the score is composed after the three nuclei of the ISPRA collection. In the movement related to the Paleontology section, the artist invites listeners on an imaginary walk through the flora and fauna of thousands of years ago, guided by original sounds recorded by foley artists. None of these sounds come from the real environment, nor are they simulated digitally, but are the result of collaboration with the Marinelli studio, which, using foley artist techniques, created the sounds of a primeval forest by playing parts of their bodies and common objects to suggest the existence of extinct animal species. Another movement relates to the Lithology and Mineralogy sections: the sound compares the mining of minerals to chewing with ASMR sounds, illustrating the human hunger that consumes natural resources. Voices pronounce–and chew–the scientific names of selected stones from the collection. Eventually, in the movement related to the Historical Collections original sounds from films that have marked the history of cinema–coming from the Marinelli archive–evoke the flow of human life linked to the places depicted in the models and maps from the ISPRA Historical Collections. It is a sort of sonic history of the anthropocene, reconstructed through iconic sounds from Italian cinema, ranging from the car horn in Dino Risi’s The Easy Life to the oil drills in Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Affair. The other two movements of the sound installation can be accessed, also via QR code, inside the Hall of Sciences, near the Paleontology and Lithology Collections. ML
