Daniela Cascella

Sound is my main research area. For over ten years I curated site-specific projects, new commissions and series of talks and performances related to sound, and wrote extensively about music and sound in books, essays, articles and reviews. Over the last couple of years, curating has become a side activity, as I have decided to focus mostly on writing – on writing of sound and around it.

Not being a musicologist or a musician, I never seek to examine the construction of a sound piece per se – I am interested, rather, in what comes after the piece: in the space between the work and what occurs around it. Working in the realm of sound and all types of leakage, expansion and cross-border transitions of sound toward other art forms, I also had to search for new ways of presenting sound and discussing it.

I have found my specific angle to write about sound by means of attention to literature. It's been said that sound is one of the most elusive media to write about. I have always aimed at enhancing such elusiveness inherent in sound, rather than trying to confine sound in structural descriptions. It is also true that the history of recorded sound is relatively brief, as compared to the visual world. I often seek my inspiration in written descriptions of sound from those times before recording technologies were made available to a wider public, exploring ways in which writers would write about sound and music as the utmost fleeting experience. By doing so, some sort of mise en abyme is staged, which refers to something that keeps escaping by its very nature. I am interested in constructing and enhancing such a sense of vertigo.