Daniela Cascella is an Italian writer based in London. Her research is focused on sound and listening across a range of publications and curated projects. Her most recent work explores Writing Sound in connection to voicing, memory, personal/collective histories and the ephemeral, and the interplay between fiction and criticism.
Her new book En abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction was published by Zer0 Books in September 2012. The book explores listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory and return, reshaped into the present. It introduces an idea of aural landscape as a historically defined cultural experience and contributes to the emerging area of listening as artistic practice, adopting an expansive approach across poetry, visual art and literature.
She blogs on Writing Sound, gives readings and leads workshops on Listening and Writing.
'Writing Sound is a mise en abîme with blurred margins, where the frame of each new scene fades into the next and is not clearly defined: where memories and words from the past are renewed into the now. Writing Sound is prompted by a question: "Where am I?". It enquires about a place, and it constructs over and over the landscape in which I locate myself, or lose myself – personally, culturally – every time I set out to write after listening. It opens incremental horizons through the singularities of each telling. It doesn't have to do with prescriptive ways, all-encompassing categories or defining reasons, but with the presence of an experience and of a place, in the intermittences, the raptures and the falls of every other today'.
Daniela holds an MFA in Art Writing from Goldsmiths University of London.
Recent projects (2011/2012) include readings and presentations at the Ephemeral Sustainability conference, Lydgalleriet, Bergen; the Writing Sound Symposium, SARU, Oxford Brookes University; the Sound Art Theories Symposium, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; A Landscape, a talk with Steve Roden at SoundFjord, London; On Listening, a performance lecture with David Toop and Salomé Voegelin at the Off the Page festival, Whitstable.
Her essays have been published in books and exhibition catalogues internationally, on Koenig Books, Errant Bodies Press and raster-noton among the others. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The Wire, frieze.com, Organised Sound, MusicWorks, The Journal of Sonic Studies.
Prior to her move to London, Daniela worked in Rome, Italy as a journalist and curator specialising in Sound Art, producing and curating projects for museums and public institutions such as the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome and the British School at Rome. Between 2000 and 2008 she was contributing editor of Blow Up music magazine, for which she also wrote a monthly column on sound and the arts entitled Eyes Wide Shut. She has published two books in Italian, Scultori di Suono (Sculptors of Sound), 2005, and The Edge Of The World, 2008.