Steven Feld

Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities.

Shadow-walks (Florence) is the Italian chapter of Viv Corringham’s ongoing project that responds to people’s relationship with familiar places and explores how that bond links to an interior landscape of personal history, memory and association.

In Florence she has been walking together with an actress, a street vendor, a graphic designer, a performer and a former school teacher; they took her to the post office, the market, villas closed by walls, the hospital, an occupied house and cafés… she then walked the same routes by herself creating her own rendering through vocal improvisation.

The project involves three main activities: walking with others, listening and singing; it relates with soundscape, the explored places and its inhabitants keeping in mind that knowing where you are is knowing who you are.

Viv Corringham knows how to listen; in fact, this is the common thread that unites her work: vocal virtuosity, composition and improvisation are tools aimed at listening, our listening. Shadow Walk (Florence) is a five-stop walk in search of Florence out of the limelight. Like a game of Chinese boxes, one way of listening opens the door to another: from the street, we enter a bar and then the post office, from the fishmonger we go to the market, we go through the country and sit down in the hospital. Viv Corringham’s work does not mean to be a documentary or sociological, it does not claim to tell any particular ‘stories’, but as it drags us through the daily life of a neighborhood, it illustrates points of view that are unexpected or usually taken for granted.

Shadow Walks (Florence) is a work by Viv Corringham for Nuovi Paesaggi [radiopapesse.org/nuovipaesaggi], a project by Radio Papesse and Villa Romana; it is produced by Radio Papesse and curated by Lucia Farinati.

Viv Corringham lives and works in Minneapolis, US.

This work was recorded in Florence (Italy) and produced in Autumn 2012.

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