Dry/Wet Stone Walls
As part of the Pre-PhD-programm EARS in 2026 I am going to develop a doctoral project in artistic research. Departing from a landscape encounter in southwest Liguria, Italy, where terraced hillsides have been shaped by collective building of dry stone walls for centuries, the project investigates how acoustic practices can reveal what is held within these structures. A series of questions about relational perception of space and to sound as epistemological tool, will be explored through artistic research, drawing on sound art, acoustic ecology, and spatial composition. These questions will be pursued across the mediterranean and alpine cultural and ecological contexts of Liguria and Switzerland. Through close attention to traditional building processes and speculative engagement with future landscape transformations, while attuning to past presences, the project seeks to unfold in immersive spatial installations designed to foster embodied & multisensory engagement with the ecological, material, and cultural heritage embedded in dry stone walls.
Dry stone walling, as a collective cultural practice and ecological infrastructure, is a technique of building without binding material that has shaped landscapes, ecosystems, and forms of communal knowledge for thousands of years across Europe, particularly in the Alpine and Mediterranean regions. Terraced hillsides, paths, shelters and agricultural systems testify to a practice in which cultural, material and ecological processes are inseparably intertwined. With industrialisation and rural depopulation, many of these structures fell into disrepair. The collective maintenance practices that sustained them disappeared. In 2018, the art of dry stone walling was recognised by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage, underlining its cultural significance while simultaneously pointing to its precarity in the present.
The pilot project Dry/Wet Stone Walls investigates the importance of dry stone walling as a human cultural practice through methods of sound art, acoustic ecology and spatial composition. How can modern dichotomies such as nature/culture and nature/technology be questioned by foregrounding Listening as a relational and situated practice in which technologies, in Haraway’s sense, act as co-creative agents rather than passive instruments? The project’s core framework uses an analogy drawn from signal theory: “Dry” refers to analytical observation and documentation, while “Wet” refers to creative actions and artistic applications. Rather than separate phases, these modes oscillate and inform each other, allowing iterative feedback between classic scientific research and artistic production. This framework allows the project to resist rigid disciplinary boundaries and to attend to transitional states, in-betweens and feedback loops between research and artistic production that aim towards a process oriented artistic practice.
The overarching research questions of the pilot project are:
How can acoustic practices reveal ecological, material and cultural knowledge embedded in dry stone walls?
How can spatial sound technologies communicate these relations into experiential installations that foster embodied and multisensory understanding?The project seeks to explore sound as a medium of knowledge transmission. Ambisonic recording and spatial sound diffusion will be employed to create installations and/or sculptures that engage auditory, spatial, multisensory and haptic perception, situating the listener within a dynamic field of relations. The pilot project is conceived as a process of learning, sharing and experimentation, laying the groundwork for a future PhD project at the intersection of sound art, acoustic ecology and spatial performance.