Artists: Giulia Cacopardo, Giulia Incicco, Stefano Galeazzi (2020)

This project aims to map the soundscape of Sant’Erasmo, the biggest island in Venice’s Lagoon – if we consider Venice as an archipelago – known as “the vegetable garden of Venice” because of its agricultural vocation. However, since the ‘70s it has experienced a process of depopulation, mostly because of unfavourable housing policy, which also led to a progressing abandonment of the crops. We asked ourselves what is the sound of abandonment and tried to interpret the space through the sounds that we have heard during our ethnographic observation.

These maps are the attempt to represent the environmental sound of the island – conceived as a milieu where humans and non humans co-create a shared space through the use of (a colour-code) colours.
In fact, the intersection of colours explicates, somehow, the mixture of sounds a person can listen to and experience in Sant’Erasmo’s island, and they reflect the continuous fluidity of the environment due to seasonality.
The complexity of the contemporary world leaves humanity with an overlap of realities, ideas, views and sounds. Silence and noise, voices and animals’ calls offer us a privileged point of view on how spaces are changing, thus the importance to read, map and analyse the world through the sounds. However, sounds are commonly experienced through hearing. What we have tried to realize is a visual experience of the sound.
Have you ever imagined a sound beyond the scientific framework? Have you ever tried to visualize a sound?