A Black Hole’s Horizon

I would like to start with a posture, my own. 

INT. Fondazione ICA, Milan, February 14, 2025.

This is how the scenes are introduced in a screenplay: through a few, essential coordinates aimed at giving a framework in which to set the action. First, however, there are the words: what to remove, what to insert, what to make the viewers imagine in order to suspend their disbelief. Later, perhaps, the words will turn again into images, movements, desires and, finally, into other secret words (to each their own, to be betrayed every time someone speaks of them to someone else). 

Leaning against the right wall of the ground floor of Fondazione ICA—all the weight shifted on my shoulder, head tilted slightly to the left—I see the words materialize on the white projection of the back wall. Slowly at first, then faster, then following one another in an arrhythmia that makes me realize how “slow” and “fast” are not the right terms when time, as in this case, is cracked (like my neck that slightly, unnaturally, is shifted to the left).

“It was my first night in the Amazon jungle, which during the day is crammed with life, a constantly vibrating organism, but only at night does it reveal itself as a vertiginous soundscape, a primordial voice that envelops and captivates. What can’t be expressed in color in the dark, in the jungle night becomes a concert.” 

So begins the filling—almost a spontaneous corruption—of the white wall: by a tale of darkness and terrible life proceeding indifferently all around. Luca Trevisani is writing it, crouching on the keyboard—hands quick and eyes fixed to corrupt the white of the pc screen. Impossible to guess whether he is reminiscing or imagining, if he is still widening the orbits of his night spent in the Amazon jungle or taking that dark puff to the “most European city in Italy.” Perhaps both.

I’m at the performance of AMAZOOM’s record launch, Trevisani’s first LP produced by Xing as the sixteenth release of the XONG collection – artist records. I am also, for a moment, in the Amazon forest. But first of all I am leaning against the right wall of the ground floor of Fondazione ICA. How is this possible? AMAZOOM is an exercise in uncoordination: of spaces, referents, situations. There is an invisible liana between ICA, my slightly tilted neck, and the hut where Trevisani has begun to transcribe, in words, the sonic impressions of one of the most ancient biomes on the planet: perhaps the inadequacy of my gaze in trying to follow the wild syntax crawling on the white wall, or the sneering split between these words and the tenebrous sounds connected to them. I certainly have no control. This is a strange perception, somehow also cozy: straining my nerves while trying to wrap up (Western deformation) a hypothetical linearity of the text and, meanwhile, suffering the checkmate of my attention each time a new sound rumbles around the letters, the words and inside the walls of the ground floor of Fondazione ICA, Milan, February 14, 2025. 

The prototype of this sound performance was born for the record launch made a few days earlier in Bologna, at Xing’s space Raum, and quickly consolidated into a live-media from the score text published with the record. A work of ecphrasis and sound restitution.

These archaic sounds are linked to the keyboard’s letters: Trevisani writes and, in doing so, sheds light on the darkness of the jungle, trying to bring back, through filtering it, what is not allowed to be seen. It is the B-side of AMAZOOM that is being performed: some thirty sounds selected from the synthesized, flooded jungle of the A-side, then each associated with a key on the PC keyboard. 

I am watching the making of a shorthand of abandonment, in service of this inconceivable vastness.

Can Luca be said to write the Amazon? I wondered about this as the verbo-jungle arrhythmia released from his keyboard materialized before me: the words telling of the hellish night spent in the jungle—unheard-of night, too full of sounds and entities—of the impossibility of sleeping and that of recording that vital secret because of the broken apparatus, and finally of the almost simultaneous choice to transcribe “that inescapable concert, terrifying and teeming, obsessive and overwhelming.” I begin to catch a glimpse of the previously invisible liana: my attempt at transcription, of ICA’s wall, now closer to Trevisani’s initial (initiatory) one, as if they were two same tensions dilated in time but linked in sharing a titanic irony—accept the excess, write it anyway. 

“Someone mumbles, something whistles, some squeak, some hoot, some hum. It feels like being inside a cosmic pinball machine, distorted and haunted, where new balls are added every moment, and the old ones never stop flitting about, speaking with ancestral charisma.”

The text on the white wall, I don’t know how long later, continues like this. I remember these and other scattered fragments, because it is impossible to keep up with the pressing and confusing sound. AMAZOOM is, indeed, this paradoxical attempt, amused and ramshackle, to transcribe the indefinite and the invisible: to decide to stay in this orbit and pull something out of it that resembles not so much a faithful rendering of an experience, but more a kind of psychic choreography in which the initial referent itself is lost, as if reverberating from afar.

The Amazon experienced, transcribed, played by Trevisani is a situation and a filter: the same with which one lives and makes porous every experience.

About halfway through the performance I am addicted to this set of partialities: by now adept at accepting the out-of-bounds play of my eyes bouncing from screen to computer to wall to the people’s coats next to me to the Amazon to South Milan to all the times the excess of the world has pressed me into its mystery. The invisible liana of AMAZOOM is, in this moment, between people, their bodies and their postures. 

As for my own, it is still the same—the neck now accustomed to the slight crack to the left —only the wall on which my right shoulder rests seems almost to lose consistency, softening for a few seconds. Nothing disconcerting: they are the nerves of the deltoid that fall asleep for a few moments, thus diminishing their receptivity. Yet I hear it all, being alert in this impossible transcription of Trevisani’s writing that is mixed with techno-amazon sound that is mixed with images, and imaginations. How is it possible that this pseudo-extension of my sleepy musculature coexists with the nervous tension that makes my eyes and mind tingle? When we were in the studio together, talking about AMAZOOM, Luca told me something that more or less sounded like this: “Being other while remaining yourself.” 

I could end here, but I want to keep going around in circles, in the forest. I say circling, because AMAZOOM is also this wandering in the flesh of things and in the thick of the jungle. Two spaces, these ones, where it is difficult to find a satisfactory linearity (even this somewhat jungle-like text, so far will have disappointed every expectation of détente and especially of explanation). In the meantime, the white wall on the ground floor of Fondazione ICA Milano is still proceeding in its inselvation: 

“How I wish I had the talent necessary to describe that bounty, that overflowing, that flooding of voices, that ferment of sounds, even if it’s truly senseless to try to contain it with words and to separate each element from the broth it swam in, because the rule of the forest is accumulation, its economy is overindulgence, and its law is excess.”

At this point, even the wall to my right is a simmering soup (or perhaps it is the heat of the deltoid stretching and awakening). I decide to stay in my surroundings, like Trevisani in his Amazonian night when he decided to start sculpting the A-side of AMAZOOM by transcribing on the PC the impressions of the hundreds of night sounds roaring from the darkness of the forest. Would he have written with his eyes closed or open? In any case, AMAZOOM was born in the night and the mess, in that fateful moment when one cannot see and in the process is seen (who knows) by everything else. Perhaps something can be felt, migrating just beyond the checkmate of vision and any definitive, defining language. AMAZOOM is the obsession and at the same time the embarrassment of discourse, but also a roving invitation to stay, trying to be in this excess, to rendering it, surrendering to it, translating it by sensing the jungle everywhere, laughing at it, meeting in it, getting stuck in it.

I would now like to dwell on these brothy, elusive coordinates: the hundreds of scattered sounds obtained through a process of sonification of the Amazon text—in collaboration with Pasquale Savignano, a Bologna-based musician, composer, and sound designer—layered and blurred in the screen jungle of AMAZOOM‘s A-side, also thought of as an overlay of filters and situations, modulations and betrayals. When I first listened to it, I (yes) had my eyes closed (perhaps even then my neck was tilted slightly to the left, as in Fondazione ICA, but I didn’t notice). In my ruled notebook (linearity) I tried an experiment: writing without seeing, as if to activate an archaic muscle memory at once cultural and wild. 

“Boil.” “Magma.” “Bubble, Burst.” “Strip.” “Membrane.” “Animal puff.” “Scrape.” “Dig.” “Rumbling.” “Coffee pot.” “Yawn.” May these be some of the earliest images of the first hazy imagination of the first human animal beings? The description of an excess, accomplished through a diaphanous gesture simultaneously swaggering and fearful, human in a special and difficult way, one that reveals itself through accepting its animal component: at the same time forest “prey” and ramshackle and ironic “predator” through transcription, sound, white vinyl, the screen jungle of side A and the keyboard forest of side B.

Runa-pumas come to mind: they are the shape-shifting jaguar-humans of the Ecuadorian Amazon mentioned by anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, during his investigation of the other-than-human dimension which is central to the cosmology of the Runa people of Avila: 

“Gods speaking through cows’ bodies, Indians in the bodies of jaguars, jaguars dressed as white people, runa pumas are all of this. And we anthropologists—great experts in ethnographically mapping the specific sense-filled and morally charged worlds we humans create (Those particular worlds that make us feel so exceptional in the universe)—what should we do with this strange, other-than-human and, yet, all-too-human creature? How should we approach this Amazonian sphinx?”

I like to think of the sounds of AMAZOOM—the sonic scattering of side A and the ramshackle noise machine of side B—as the building blocks of this sphinx, which is now a bit Amazon’s, a bit Trevisani’s, and a bit mine. I am always leaning against the right wall of the ground floor of Fondazione ICA, Milan, February 14th, 2025, watching/hearing/touching the machine gun of the keyboard that is meanwhile recounting the unaccountable. Where does the Amazon get lost in the two sides of the white vinyl AMAZOOM? How, to what extent, does it expand? 

If the sphinx cannot be defeated, let it be used as a method: a protocol for entering some situation, dying in it a little, changing in it. In other worlds, to Enforest oneself, as French philosopher Baptiste Morizot writes in the first chapter of “Sulla pista animale”:

“Enforesting oneself (Inforestarsi, N.d.A) is a double capture returned by the pronominal: we go into the forest as much as it moves into us. Enforesting does not demand a forest in the strict sense, but simply another relationship with living territories: the double movement of going through them in a different way, connecting to them through other forms of attention and other practices; and of letting them move into us.”

AMAZOOM as two hypotheses of reincarnation of a landscape—geographical, mental, corporeal—and as entropic choreography within which to remain, even after listening. Leaking into the meshes of this scaffolding, the sounds of the LP testify to the porosity of the forest and its becoming inner space, body, and skin. Trevisani’s Amazon is filtered, translated and betrayed into its secret biotic language: 

“And if to translate is always to betray, as the Italian proverb goes, a translation worthy of the name […] is one that betrays the target language and not the source language. Good translation succeeds in making the concepts of the foreign language deform and subvert the conceptual device of the translator […]. Translation, betrayal, transformation.”

These are words by anthropologist Edouardo Viveiros de Castro, who is among the protagonists, through his research on Amerindian cosmologies, of the discipline’s ontological turn, no longer focused on the analysis of human collectives’ concepts but on the modulation of the concept of concept itself (understood as indigenous deconstruction of the Western process of conceptualization). In other words, all these orbiting accounts of AMAZOOM come together in sharing the urgency of all that work that comes just before definition, and beyond any sovereign gaze. It is a practice of radical and continuous decolonization of thought (to use another  De Castro’s expression) that Trevisani nevertheless distills, through this project, with irony and a certain smiling tension—surely other forms of radicality.

In AMAZOOM the other-than-human and the human meet by stretching each other to the point of blurring each other’s contours. Filters upon filters and betrayals upon betrayals when one realizes that the abyss, the vulnerability, the undergone act of being-seen, are situations terribly at hand, and intuitable in any mutual gaze. After the Amazon, beyond the Amazon.  

We need to work and sculpt this intersection and exchange of energies, fitting into a common ramshackle transcription of things, as Trevisani does in his jungle and as this text is also attempting to do. To restore, also, tactility to this junglesque and free grammar that allows itself to explode within each encounter in order to, again, “Be other while remaining itself”: half gesture and half animal body, like that median dimension evoked by the seed of Parartocarpus venenosa, also called “monkey comb,” of which Trevisani makes thirty 3D-printed sculptures to be placed at the center of the Collector’s Editions’ vinyl.

It is curious how the very form of vinyl, and its very performativity, proceed circularly as the stylus slides—as if accompanied by a somewhat mechanical somewhat natural force—to the center. We often fail to notice that the center of things, their most terrible part where we rediscover ourselves together as human and animal, is always there watching us as we worry about failing to see, and sleeping, trying to clean our filters and empty the world around us. AMAZOOM is, instead, the transcript of a full, overflowing, real whole: perhaps a challenge or an invitation to intercept the melancholies, ironies, and alliances that can form in this state of primal vulnerability.

The performance, this performance, is coming to an end. My deltoid has regained receptivity, my eyes now accustomed to bouncing from words, to images, to Trevisani, to my neck, to the necks of those around me. The center is always a matter of movement, of listening, of invisibility. 

But the center is also a filter. I don’t know what the effects of the Amazon puffs were in the other presentations at Raum on February 6, during Arte Fiera (February 7-9), in the Paint it Black bookshop in Turin, or finally in the IUAV University’s Cotonificio during the Sonic Encounters exhibition, then followed by a listening session at the bruno art bookshop, also in Venice. That’s okay, not to have a totality. It would be nice to assume a grammar of our filtered secrets and centers.

What is certain is that the AMAZOOM’s sounds—which are ultimately metamorphosis and matter—have let the nocturnal echo of the jungle slip, spreading their lopsided, ironic and monstrous imaginative protocol: a free score in which to work together to destroy the sovereign gaze all at once, to sense the black holes that always surround us, and having fun in dying a little on their horizon, before the mystery of that we cannot conquer.