BODY AS A SONIC LANDSCAPE (NAPOLI MACABRE)
Body as a Sonic Landscape performance at Napoli Macabre solo exposition with immersive installation and visual works (2025)
Performance, 1 hour and 20 minutes, installation ongoing
PERFORMANCE TEXT I:
BODY AS A SONIC LANDSCAPE is a ritual of touch, sound, and matter, where bodies become clay, dust, and vibration. Two performers shift between active and passive roles, tracing skin, bones, and memories, dissolving the boundaries between body, material, and sound.
PERFORMANCE TEXT II:
BODY AS A SONIC LANDSCAPE stages two performers engaged in Body Manipulation Research, a practice that treats the body as both instrument and landscape, with sound as a primary material. The audience is invited to sit in a woumblike shape at the same height as the performers. One performer lies, while the other manipulates her using ephemeral materials and sonic objects. Roles shift fluidly, erasing the distinctions between active and passive. The body is mapped and molded in its entirety—skin, organs, bones, veins, nerves, fascia, scars, birthmarks, freckles, tattoos, memories and even chakras are all explored with care and attention. Drawing from a deep pulse of queer club culture and the charged intimacy of BDSM, the body becomes encapsulated in sound, clay, oranges, smoke, dust—a land to explore, inhabit, and lose oneself within. Through these gestures, the performers move towards where the body becomes terrain, and terrain becomes dream.
An initiation ritual into altered consciousness states through the transgression of the body and the senses, this intervention dissolves boundaries between body and mind, art and reality. It is a reckoning with chaos, impermanence, and mortality; a danse macabre that meets fragility with lucid acceptance and transforms.
The original sound for BODY AS A SONIC LANDSCAPE is a collaboration with Blake Hargreaves (CA), noise maker and organist, who lives and works in Budapest.
EXHIBITION TEXT:
Napoli Macabre invites you to experience a transformative process, a performance and installation—an initiation ritual that grants participants and audience access to altered states of consciousness through the transgression of the physical body. It embraces a non-hierarchical treatment of matter, transforming the space into a lieu de passage, a liminal threshold, a landscape, a meditation—an exchange between the corporeal and the oneiric. A burial. A transcendence of the material: earth, body, bones, blood, fascia, piss.
Here, the body is clay, lemons, smoke, dust. A transmutation of flesh into vision, a body becoming landscape—something to explore, to lose oneself within. Noise. A Black Hole. Void.
We are all just swinging doors.
This performative intervention dissolves the boundaries between body and mind, art and reality. It is a ritual of reckoning—with chaos, transience, and the inevitability of our own mortality. In surrendering to change, we lose ourselves to find ourselves. Faced with nothingness, immersed in the unknown, we encounter total insignificance—yet the impermanence of existence grants us flexibility, movement, transformation.
A danse macabre, a memento mori—a reminder of our fragility. Here, we confront it not with fear, but with solemn acceptance. A celebration of life.
Credits:
A work by Maddie Marone.
Performed by: Alina Trionow and Maddie Marone
Music by: Blake Hargreaves
Curated by: Estelle Quarino
Film and Photography by: Joshua Goodman
Montage by: Maddie Marone
Funded by: the Cultural Office of the City of Leipzig, Stiftung Kunstfonds and Neustart Kultur.
Plast Leipzig 2025
Plast @plast_space
21.03.25 – 04.05.25/ open on Sundays and by appointment.
Action Painting with Raw Materials (Napoli Macabre)