During an August week, just before Piazza San Francesco was closed due to Covid related restrictions, I spent several hours sitting and walking around the main public square in the Pratello neighbourhood. During this time I took photos, videos and audio recordings of what happened around me. I did so trying to de-familiarize myself from the place and capturing those details that I usually perceive as an inherent part of the background.
What I realized by going through these materials, is the variety of people – and animals – tha populate this place. They all bring different sounds, physicalities and forms of interaction with each other into the space, generating a constantly changing landscape and atmosphere. How to capture it though? And in particular, how to represent it?
I tried to juxtapose and superimpose different movements by joining images into a short video. In doing so I have also tried to conflate the temporalities of such actions by bringing them all together in the space of one minute. I finally used different audio tracks to bring together voices, sounds and noises that usually manifest separately.
Unfortunately the result is much lamer than what I had imagined and notwithstanding the synthetic intention of the video I left out more than I included. Not a failure but a first, very rough attempt.
What does emerge from the video though, are, on the one hand, the different layers of modes and practices that populate a public square and confer it its atmosphere and, on the other hand, the immersion of the senses into the stimuli that such layers generate. Stepping outside of such immersion by dissecting and analyzing each piece of the sound-visualscape is an interesting experience and shows how easy it is to get accustomed to sounds that heavily affect us such as the noise of a bus’s engine or the high pitched bark of a small-size dog.