Reels Joy | Vittoria Assembri

Remember how you feel when you get a new tape or vinyl, open it, read every line, and look at the grooves knowing they are going to be your best friends?

This recording is the result of a research I did in this period in a former asbestos and rubber factory in the southern area of Buenos Aires, during a residency at CHELA, a Latin American experimentation center of research.

The Noise of the Void is a work that interweaves the deep listening practices of the theorist Pauline Oliveros, those of walking, listening and sound-making of Elena Biserna, and the environmental science of Rachel Carson. The investigation begins in the perimeter and marginal borders of the city of Buenos Aires, among the abandoned industrial ruins, until reaching the block of Parque Patricios where the former factory built by the architects Osvaldo and Fernando Fornari in the 1930s is located, and then plung into its gutted interior.

The sound performance is developed by reactivating the sounds of the factory in its years of activity, first a disastrous asbesto’s factory, then a christmas decoration’s warehouse; then the noises of what remains, of the materials and debris recovered from the building resonate, distorting them; and leaving the entire space to emptiness and a deafening silence, as a protected place to reflect and imagine new possibilities for those imposing architectures that remain imbued with their memory but are also manifestos of political, urban and emotional resistance.