Installation | Pasquale Savignano: “SURROUNDINGS”
SURROUNDINGS is a site-specific sound installation that transforms walking, listening, and spatial memory into a continuously unfolding sonic environment. The work is built from GPS-tracked field recordings captured through attentive movement in and around the exhibition site. These recordings are not presented as documents of place, but as living material that is reactivated, displaced, and rewoven within the space itself.
Four loudspeakers are distributed across the site, defining a navigable field rather than a fixed listening position. Sound moves between them following the original trajectories of the recorded walks, scaled and reoriented to fit the architecture or landscape of the installation. The visitor’s experience emerges from this superposition of paths: multiple sonic traces coexist, intersect, expand, and dissolve, producing a dynamic impression of the surroundings rather than a literal representation.
The installation focuses primarily on keynote sounds – the persistent acoustic textures that shape everyday environments – rather than on spectacular or foregrounded events. Through subtle processing derived from convolution, filtering, and granular techniques, these sounds are stretched and smoothed, allowing their timbral essence to surface while remaining closely tied to their original context. At times, lightly processed documentary sounds emerge, blurring the boundary between the audible present and the remembered past.
Listening unfolds through movement. Visitors are free to walk, pause, or circle the space, allowing their perception to shift between the installation, the actual soundscape, and their own internal listening. The work does not impose a narrative or a fixed duration; instead, it offers a continuous temporal flow that mirrors the rhythms of walking and environmental change.
Visually, the installation remains restrained and functional. Loudspeakers and cabling are integrated into the space in a manner that suggests infrastructure rather than spectacle, reinforcing the idea of sound as an environmental layer rather than an object. The result is a non-disruptive intervention that operates near the threshold of audibility, encouraging a heightened awareness of place.
SURROUNDINGS proposes listening as a form of situated knowledge: an embodied practice through which space is not only perceived, but actively composed.
About the artist
Pasquale Savignano (1/5/1994) is a sound artist and composer working with field recordings and digital sound processing to explore the boundaries of physical and sonic space in various fields: electroacoustic music, improvisation, video art, sound and multimedia installations. His research moves mainly between the flux of
relationships and interferences in the soundscape. His works have been presented internationally in galleries, public spaces and festivals, such as Angelica International Music Festival, Pulsar Festival, Echoes Around Me, Festival di Nuova Consonanza, Tempo Reale Festival, Xing, Archivio Aperto, ArtCity, Hyperlocal Festival, Experimance Festival, ICMC, ToListenTo, and others. He has collaborated and performed with artists such as Alvin Curran, Francesco Giomi, Elio Martusciello, Maria Hassabi, Elvin Brandhi, Jacopo Benassi, Marcello Maloberti, Daniela Cattivelli, Alessandro Bosetti, Muna Mussie, Francesco Cavaliere and many
others. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Sound&Music Computing and Cultural Heritage at Conservatorio di Musica G. Verdi di Torino and collaborates with Xing (Bologna – IT) and Marcello Maloberti Studio (Milano – IT).