Le sixième Silence (resonare), 2025

Le sixième Silence (resonare), 2025 – Fine Art Print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Baryt 325 g/m2, 100*100 cm

resonare is the outcome of a four-day residency hosted in the gallery space of Fonderia 20.9, featuring Sara Palmieri, Flaminia Celata, Bärbel Praun, and Claire Laude. 

Working in close dialogue, the artists engaged with the disused Cavadini bell foundry—established in 1792 and closed in 1974—located near the gallery, which became an archaeological and conceptual site of research. Rather than producing work in situ, the foundry was approached as a place to be studied, listened to, and reinterpreted through interdisciplinary practices.

At the heart of this process is sound, which does not function only as a medium but more as a methodology. The Cavadini foundry, once dedicated to the casting of bronze bells, carries a dense sonic heritage. Historically, bells produced before the twentieth century were not calibrated to precise musical notes; their tone depended on unique variables of size, shape, and material. Each carried a singular voice, slightly off by today’s acoustic standards but deeply embedded in local memory and identity. Today, these older bells are preserved not only as objects of heritage, but as vessels of continuity—allowing us to hear the same sounds that communities heard over a century ago.

Equally significant is the act of bell-ringing itself: a physical engagement where the ringer, pulling ropes from a space below, cannot see the bell in motion above. The gesture is guided by memory, rhythm, and trust—a performative act where sound is produced without visual confirmation, echoing the notion of movement as belief.

Through sound, photography, installation, and video, the artists developed works that reactivate the memory of the foundry within the gallery space. Sound becomes a key strategy for spatial activation, allowing the gallery to resonate as a site of reassembled echoes, gestures, and translations.

The showcase brings together diverse formats: visual imprints, sound recordings, performative gestures, and sculptural interventions. Repetition, transformation, and the shifting presence of materials across media reflect a collective investigation into how space, time, and memory intersect through artistic process.

resonare is part of the broader project Between Memory, Place and Matter by Sara Palmieri, developed in collaboration with the Embassy of Italy in Riga and supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture (…).

Text from Rocco Venezia, Artistic Director Fonderia 20.9, Verona

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