17. tra[verso]

tra[verso] unfolds as an exploration of a hybrid landscape, a mutable field in which human and nonhuman forces, acoustic and electronic matter, natural and digital forms dissolve and recombine. Conceived by composer Sevan Gharibian and visual artist Juan Jesús Moreno, the work reframes landscape as a living, perceptual terrain: a space of interactivity, transformation, and continuous emergence.

At the core of the piece is a process of decomposition and recomposition. Sound, text, and image unmoor themselves from conventional identities, entering a dynamic environment where every gesture, resonance, and visual mutation participates in an allegory of cyclical renewal. Rather than lamenting ecological loss, tra[verso] imagines a utopian field of coexistence, where dissolution becomes a generative act: every breath and particle carries the seed of new forms.

Philosophically, the work draws on Deleuze’s concept of becoming and the Body without Organs, treating matter as continuous, mutable, and recombinable; the collective unconscious, which supplies archetypal gestures and forms; and pre-modern cosmologies, in which humans, winds, and plants are threads in a shared energetic web. These ideas shape both the temporal and spatial landscape of the piece, guiding its dream-logic structure, in which forms fragment, overlap, and emerge across time. Musically, tra[verso] articulates thresholds between the organic and the synthetic. Grounding this terrain is a layer of pastoral memory: rhythmic lilts and harmonic fragments derived from traditional accordion recordings from Zorzone (Val Brembana). These vernacular echoes interact with whispering currents drawn from the piano and the tuba, as melodic lines – carrying fragments of text by Whitman, Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Emerson – emerge and recede, oscillating between quasi-cantabile clarity, moments of confessional intimacy, and declamations. Live electronics extend these gestures into a quadraphonic spatial field, hybridizing sources into a living sonic terrain.

The visual layer, developed through projection mapping and 3D modelling, mirrors this metabolic process: figurative forms dissolve into rhizomatic particle swarms. Spanning live performance and museum installation, tra[verso] explores environments shaped by organic gestures and technological mediation, inviting us to imagine alternative modes of relationality – less hierarchical and fully entangled with the more-than-human world – where every observer participates in the ongoing recomposition of the field. In every moment of dissolution lies the seed of another life, and in every field of interaction emerges a landscape that is at once real, virtual, and profoundly shared.