‘Rossella Biscotti, the Journey’

The performance The Journey takes you on a sound experience in a space in Bozar, which transforms into the hull of a moving ship. It all started in 2010 when Rossella Biscotti was awarded a 20-ton block of marble. During last year’s Kunstenfestivaldesarts, she created an invisible performance: the stone had been loaded onto a boat, navigating a GPS-determined route between Italy, Malta, Tunisia and Libya, to finally be dropped into the Mediterranean Sea. Biscotti used the block as a mechanism to unpack the political, economic, and environmental layers of a complex body of water. The sound recorded last year in the middle of the sea is the starting point of today’s immersive sonic performance in Bozar: the hum of the engines, the ceaseless sea; the interaction with Alarm Phone, the songs of fishermen; reflections around the event, and the sound of a marble block disappearing into the waters. Every night live guests now enter this metaphorical black box, adding their reflections, poetry, or artistic interventions. The Journey creates an incredibly powerful imaginative space, taking listeners on an expedition of sound in the Mediterranean, where one can have audible encounters with that which is normally invisible.

You can have a look at the pictures of the performance The Journey, listen to the sound archive The Sonic Diary, and read the interview with Rossella Biscotti (in English).

A project by: Rossella Biscotti | Field recording: Attila Faravelli | Photographs by: Alexandra Pace | GIS maps: Catalogtree | Blitz’s curator: Sara Dolfi Agostini | Project manager: Kristina Borg | DOP: Cristian Manzutto | Research: Emna Lakhoua, in collaboration with Timmy Gambin, Anthony Gruppetta, Nature Trust Malta, Aaron Micallef, Alarmphone, Lewis Baldacchino, Elman Srl, Studi d’Arte Cave Michelangelo Carrara | Guests: Yasmina Reggad, Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, Joëlle Sambi, Sinthujan Varatharajah
The performance at sea took place on May 20–23, 2021