Download a PDF version of the Manifesto here
Italian theorist and curator Leandro Pisano, and Australian sound artist Philip Samartzis collaborate to present ‘A Manifesto of Rural Futurism’, a lecture supported by series of recordings exploring the sounds of remote southern Italian communities. The Manifesto provides a critical perspective in which multiple points of view converge to afford new and striking ways to rethink ‘rurality’.
This sonic programme is a journey through more than fifteen years of Interferenze, a research project carried out across several rural areas of southern Italy, from Irpinia to Sannio, from Cilento to Fortore, from Molise to the peripheral area of Palermo. It features a selection of context-specific works realized by international artists during a series of art residencies in the region of Campania, thus resulting in an “invisible” sound map made of voices, places, people and landscapes.
Firstly conceived as a sound art, techno-culture, and rurality festival, over time Interferenze turned into a wider research platform, which in turn created and produced several different outputs, such as workshops, art residencies, and field-work research projects. Among these are Mediaterrae Vol. 1, Barsento Mediascape, Risonanze di Vino, and Liminaria.
This exhibition is just one of the many possible routes along the project’s very long journey across the South. It presents just one of the countless sonic possible worlds that generated over time from the flux of listening practices, bodies, and ideas activated within the project.
In this context, sound becomes a research tool in itself, which can help tackle various material, cultural, social, economic and ecological processes beyond the merely “visual”, thus accessing levels that are imperceptible to the sight. This “acoustemological approach” where sound is linked to knowledge – is a challenge raised to the current political discourses and paradigms that relegate rurality to invisibility and to a marginal position in the contemporary era.
This programme was presented for the first time in a different version during the 2018 edition of Liminaria, a project curated by Leandro Pisano and Beatrice Ferrara, as collateral event of the Manifesta12 Biennale.
We would like to acknowledge the following institutions for their support of this project: Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, Istituto Italiano di Cultura (Melbourne) and the Contemporary Art and Social Transformation Research Group in the School of Art, RMIT University.