Introduction

Sound Threshold was established in 2007 by Daniela Cascella and Lucia Farinati, as a long-term research project which explores the relationships between site and sound. The project is rooted in a shared background and interest in literature, experimental music, art history, and over a decade of experience in writing and in curating visual and sonic arts projects.

Prompted by an initial discussion about how to revisit the alpine landscape of the Trentino region in Northern Italy, we began exchanging hints, fragments and stories related to this specific environment. The main questions for us were:

• How does one go beyond the picture postcard effect, pierce, scratch and dismantle it in order to reassemble the rigid images and restore – indeed reveal – a more vivid sense to them; not only allowing movements and hidden currents to re-emerge, but restoring feeling and depth?
• How does one transcend conventional systems of representation, shatter two-dimensional ways of thinking and seeing, and combine modes of looking at with those of looking through?

Sound is the media through which we chose to confront such issues. Because sound is elusive, because we felt it could adapt to a variety of contexts, and to non-conventional modes of presentation.
We referred to an essay by Vilém Flusser, Line And Surface (1973) (in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books; London, 2000), in which sound was identified as an element capable of destabilising the dynamics of screen/surface. "This third dimension, which drives a wedge into the surface reading, is a challenge to those who think in surfaces; only the future can show what will come of this". We chose to use sound as an element that tears through images and simultaneously re-assembles and re-constitutes them, not just penetrating them but condensing them, not simply passing through, but stopping and absorbing.

Since its outset, Sound Threshold has investigated the idea of threshold as an extended metaphor of boundary, frontier, track, border and difference as embodied by the Latin word limes – by doing so, we have embraced an idea of landscape not only as a visual construct but also as a palimpsest of natural elements, literary references, acoustic phenomena.

In order to explore the territory and initiate an art project in response to the context of the alpine environment of Trentino, we sought partnerships with research organisations based in this area and working beyond conventional gallery and museum contexts.

The project took shape through practice, and through an intense exchange of views. Personal accounts and memories, collections of books and poetry, fragments of the past and views into new ideas: sound became also the sound of stories. We experienced landscape as mental, intimate, shared, literary space. Yet our focus has been the site of sound and its relation to the public realm.

As a result, the first season of Sound Threshold developed into an interdisciplinary collaborative project that brought together musicians, artists, ecologists, writers, curators, archaeologists and scientists; questioning the relationship between art and science and its physical, social and cultural environment.

Daniela Cascella and Lucia Farinati, May 2009