Assenti Assenti at Liminaria MMXXIV microfestival 

Substantiae Motus II – Cultural Geologies – July 2024

Assenti Assenti is a sound performance and installation that interrogates Dust of Days through another archive. It invites dust to rise and settle on electronic matter.

Sound becomes an extradisciplinary attempt to reconstruct a fragmented image of us—caught in the rise of the digital age, the hum of slide projectors, the rhythms of the Circumvesuviana train, and the voices of architecture students and aspiring photographers from Naples’ bourgeoisie. Suspended, absent.

The timeline is a layered echo: in 1990, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released; a year later, Kodak launched the first digital SLR, the DCS-100. On January 26, 1994, Berlusconi entered politics, google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, and the Genoa Diaz school raid happened on July 21, 2001. Voices from different directions—TV ads, artist interviews, layered soundscapes—compose a distant archive. What did those voices say?

A low-fi mashup unfolds in real-time: Mark Vernon (Glasgow) lends Call Back Carousel and The Dramaturgy of Decay, blending found tapes and acousmatic presence. Christian Taranto, curator, live-mixes voices from 90s contemporary art. Antonio Marano, musician, amplifies a video archive through a projector speaker—images and sounds entwined.

COB (1994), producer and musician, composed Dust of Days (texts by Giovanni Ambrosio, interviews with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, piano played and recorded by Giovanni Ambrosio) and arranged AI-generated compositions by Giovanni Ambrosio. Daniela Allocca, poet and curator, contributes her recorded poem Noi. The intro by Remi Graves, poet and drummer, is quoted from Theon Cross’s Intra-I (2021).