CZ95 Giudecca, Venice - Performative Artwork
Mother’s singing
An inclusve performance: rethinking listening beyond hearing
Mother’s singing is a performative artwork presented as the central act of B1DR – Beyond Silence Production Program at CZ95 / Giudecca, Venice, alongside performances by Marco Billi and Franco Schoeman. The programme brings together artists working with infrasound to explore vibration as a perceptual, ecological, and inclusive medium—capable of activating listening beyond the limits of the auditory system.Conceived as an inclusive format, B1DR by Franco Schoeman aims to expand musical experience toward embodied and haptic perception, opening access to deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences through vibration-based listening and live sign-language interpretation.
In this context, Mother’s singing translates an architectural and sonic research project initiated in 2019, Sounds of Etna, into a live performative form. The work is rooted in infrasound recordings of Mount Etna (Sicily, IT), one of the world’s most acoustically active volcanoes, which emits continuous low-frequency vibrations even in the absence of visible eruptions. These infrasounds—collected in collaboration with the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) in Catania—are reinterpreted through voice, electronic composition, and spatial sound.
The performance gives voice to the volcano as a living, resonant entity—often referred to in Sicilian culture as la Grande Madre. Through sound, text, and vibration, the work invites the audience into an embodied encounter with geological time and force, reflecting on Earth as both destructive and regenerative matter. Human perception is positioned as porous and receptive: a body that listens not only with the ears, but through skin, breath, and internal resonance. Operating at the intersection of sound art, performance, architecture, and environmental research, Mother’s singing proposes infrasound as a shared vibrational condition linking human bodies, landscapes, and non-human intelligences—transforming listening into a physical, relational, and planetary act.