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En Abîme: listening, reading, writing

En abîme explores listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory and return, constantly reshaped into the present. It opens up our cultural experience of the aural landscape and contributes original, previously unexplored references to the emerging area of listening as artistic practice. Through fictional and autobiographical tropes, it addresses sound art and visual art while adopting an expansive approach touching on poetry, landscape and literature; and proposes a methodology and a way of organising reference in a syncretistic, connective manner.

The writer revisits a number of places in Rome and attaches onto her recollections of those places connections to her archive of poetry, music, sound, art, literature; and references made to the same places by poets, artists, musicians, writers. Listening, reading and recalling are the methodologies that animate the fragmented narratives in the book. The non-linear structure draws on aural and visual memories, as they attach to landscape; and modifies the readers’ sense of being in a place by means of subtle repetitions of patterns, and across a split temporality. The book works as a system of echo chambers, where the same image or sound or word pattern reappears in different contexts, and is slowly eroded or repeated in a contingent present singular.

En abîme prompted a number of related texts, readings and projects before and after its publication, including Ora: Voyages into Listening and Writing, a monthly series of broadcasts (Resonance104.4Fm) with Salomé Voegelin; Sculpture curated by David Toop and Rie Nakajima; and to anthologies such as On Listening and Book Live! The theoretical core of En abîme was a paper presented at the Sound Art Theories Symposium (2011) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and published in the Sound Art Supplement of the Leonardo Music Journal (2013).