Tag: murgia

In Audibility, HYENAZ delve into the politics of sound, inviting audiences to reconsider their relationship to the audible and inaudible, to silence and silencing. Recorded in an ancient man-made cave in the Murgia region of southern Italy, poet Donato Laborante cradles a stalk of Ferula Ferita, his fingers tracing the the fibrous plant ubiquitous to these regions as he delivers an exposition on the different forms of silence. For Laborante, silence is not absence – it is an event.

The sung text which follows–eery, gutteral, raw–connects the silence of spaces to the absence of certain speaking bodies from discourse. It compels the willingness of the listener to hear differently; to tune into those voices which are absent, to make absence something worth listening to. This is not about giving voice to the voiceless, of incorporating unheard voices into already established patterns of speech and articulation (and their relavent hierarchies). Audibility dreams of a kind of sensory co-practice not yet realised where silence is not a void, but a dynamic and multifaceted presence.

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