Field recordings and sound collages by Vittoria Assembri and Matilde Solbiati.

We are already beaten by the summer heat here in Florence, that’s why we’d love to escape to other landscapes and to linger on other soundscapes.  

The Po river is the longest in Italy, flowing through most of northern Italy from west to east across the Padan Plain. And here we go, along the river, with Scivolare il Po, a journey on board of a fishing boat, from Cremona to the delta and back.

We follow Vittoria Assembri and Matilde Solbiati and the mosaics of sounds they recorded: the river banks, the swirling of the water, the boats’ motors, the conversations with the people of the Po whom they met: catfish fishermen, the lighthouse keeper, a former river racer… Scivolare il Po brings our attention back to the river, as a geographical, social, human, real and imaginary space.

Scivolare il Po gives way to Linee di fuga – Echantillons sonores, a sound collage Vittoria Assembri assembled over 10 years of field recordings, collected between 2009 and 2019, across natural and urban landscapes in Italy, France, Germany and Japan: “new sound streams are born, variable lines like images blurring in running water”.

Among the sound fragments, there are the loudspeakers of subway stations and airports in Tokyo, the sirens of Genoa’s harbour, the buzzling voices in the izakayas in Hiroshima, the sounds of stamping in Tuscan post offices, the creaking of the iron bridges of Gare du Nord in Paris, the roaring eruptions of Stromboli’s volcano, the vibrations of power grids in Berlin, a blocked elevator in a condo in San Salvario, Turin, the song of cicadas…

Linee di Fuga was produced in 2019 during a residency in Apricale, at Atelier A.
Editing: Beatrice Surano

Vittoria Assembri is a multifaceted artist, based in Paris and Venice. Her practice explores marginal territories: phonography is thus considered as a political act that makes visible what is absent in the official cartography. By sound mapping a territory, she makes the resonant landscape of everyday life audible and she uses field recording not only as a tool, but as a possibility to cross layers of everyday outcrops and as a method and device for investigating the transformations of territories and the cultural changes of the contemporary world.

Matilde Solbiati was born on January 27, 1986 in Milan. She has brown hair, brown eyes. Her dog’s name is Lord. She loves wild and mountain flowers and reading. Most of the time she looks at pictures which she mostly cuts out or scans. The rest of the time Matilde collects things she comes across and thinks.