Luca Forcucci | Residency

August - September 2022 — Music

Visual mental imagery in the sonic arts with an emphasis on the act of listening and sonic imagination has been the focus of artist and electroacoustic composer Luca Forcucci’s practice and research for the last two decades. Luca will be on residency in Ghana from 8 August to 13 September 2022 to develop his long-term project “Rituals and Sonic Arts”.

Through fieldwork, Luca has investigated transcultural aspects of sonic arts in Southern Africa, India, China, Brazil, and Europe by exploring the field of possibilities of the term “technology” existing in pre-colonial times. During research trips in Southern Africa (Mozambique, South Africa, and Eswatini) from 2015 to 2017 Luca deepened his investigation of pre-colonial instruments combined with electroacoustic devices and improvisation methods. Luca subsequently extended this research in his collaborative research and performance project “B(l)(e)(e)(n)dings” which explores the materiality of instruments and their connection with the spiritual immaterial world.

“Rituals and Sonic Arts” aims to investigate sonic arts of rituals, ancestral and indigenous technology and knowledge. Beginning in Ghana, Luca will conduct research through dialogue with musicians playing specific instruments, poets, elders, and the serendipitous encounters that may happen. He explains, “the interest resides in addressing the idea of materiality of the instruments, the voices and their connection with the immaterial world. The dialogue is also established through contemporary computer music. The augmentation of the purely material ‘thingness’ and motility of the musical instrument is proposed here as sonic potential allowing dialogues.” The intended scope of the project is extensive, exploring the promotion of multiple worldviews/world senses/world sensations as related to the traditional Indigenous Elders’ knowledge.

BIOGRAPHY

Luca Forcucci is a Swiss and Italian artist and electroacoustic composer. His research observes the perceptive properties of sound, space and memory. The field of possibilities of the first person experience is explored as the artwork. In this context, he is interested in perception, subjectivity and consciousness. The works are sound installations, sound walks, performances, videos, photography and texts. A great influence is the late American avant-garde composer and musician Pauline Oliveros and her concept of deep listening expanded to all what is humanly possible to listen to. Since 2008, he collaborates with scientists in the field of neuroscience, perception and biology, and is particularly fascinated by visual mental imagery as sonic imagination. Luca achieved a PhD in Sonic Arts from De Montfort University and holds an MA in Sonic Arts from Queens University of Belfast.

(Artist portraits © Lorenzo Pusterla)