Ulysses Syndrome

sound sculpture

"Ulysses Syndrome" is an art installation, an exploration of the experience of migration through the sound of memories of the journey of migrants, from the Italian community in South East London. Their memories were sensory triggered and at the same time the subjects were interviewed in pairs, a husband and a wife, a son and his mother, in order to help them to rebuild the structure of a memory that was almost lost.

A journey is the beginning of any story of migration. Is the point of a new beginning but at the same time of rupture of any structure of knowledge and memory we have been building before in our life. As our prenatal memory continues to exist only in our unconscious and we can not remember the moments of the womb’s transition to life into this world, also for a migrant often the memory of the journey disappears and only fragment are left to remember, overwhelmed probably by the experience of having to rebuild a new life, in a completely new world. As Nestor García Canclini expressed in his talk Migrants: Workers of Metaphors, to achieve an understanding of the importance of the millions of migrants in a society, it is necessary to pay attention to what is lost and gained in symbolic transfers, the abandonments and the recreations of meaning. Migration implies a radical way of experiencing uncertainty … These displacements of meaning are habitual in the language of the foreigner because he or she lives among facts that have other names, and names which have lost their facts. 

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Work selected for the Sound of Memory Symposium How does the resonances of individual and cultural memory contribute to the shaping of social space? The Sound of Memory symposium brings together filmmakers, artists and composers to explore the broad domain of acoustic ecologies and soundscape’s engagement in place. Concerns for working with the sounds of the environment – and engaging in how they impact on us and we on it – sprung out of the World Soundscape Project, inaugurated at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in the early 1970s. The ethnographic turn in contemporary art has prompted a renewed engagement with place. This symposium explores the aesthetic, philosophical and political approaches of composers working in acoustic ecologies and artists working within social ecologies where the primary engagement is a form of sonic ethnography.

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/eve...

Organised by The Sound-Image-Space Research Centre, School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent and the Unit for Sound Practice Research (SPR; Goldsmiths, University of London). We are partnered by The School of Sound International Symposium, 19-22 April 2017