En Abime: Listening, Reading, Writing: An Archival Fiction

by Daniela Cascella

Overview

En Abime explores listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory and return, reshaped into the present. It introduces an idea of aural landscape as a historically defined cultural experience, and contributes with previously unexplored references to the emerging area of listening as artistic practice, adopting an expansive approach across poetry, visual art and literature.

…poetic, incisive, grounded in politics and history yet continually pushing at the edges of what we now consider to be sound. She interrogates notions of music and the shifting experience that is silence with a freshness and coherence that is inspiring David Toop, Author of Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather and Sinister Resonance

… compulsive and fast, rushing with you through textual territories that seem spoken, direct and contemporary while being nostalgic - invoking a past that creates the present tense. Salomé Voegelin, author of Listening to Noise and Silence:
Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art
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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780994048
Publisher:	Collective Ink
Publication date:	09/28/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	159
File size:	293 KB

About the Author

Daniela Cascella is an Italian writer based in London. For over ten years her research has been focused on sound and listening, across publications and curated projects. Her recent work explores Writing Sound in connection to landscape and memory, and fictional tropes in criticism.Daniela holds an MFA in Art Writing from Goldsmiths University of London and won the 2011 BookWorks Award for Art Writing.She has published two books in Italian, The Edge of the World and Sculptors of Sound. Before moving to London in 2009 Daniela worked in Rome as a journalist and sound art curator.
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Table of Contents

Foreword Salomé Voegelin 1

Acknowledgments 2

Part I

Chapter 1 A Postcard from Ethel 7

1 A postcard from Ethel B. 7

2 Connections. Ethel's voice 8

3 Wall paintings. Vertigo 10

4 The front of Ethel's postcard. My personal Siren 12

5 Vigil 14

6 WWI 15

7 A Deposition 16

8 A Deposition on via Appia 18

9 Roma. Going underground 19

10 Going out, to the surface 21

Chapter 2 Inscape With Voices 23

1 Golden leaves gleam… 23

2 A lament 24

3 When I truly wanted to understand 26

4 Bella Ciao. The Captain's Testament 27

5 My way to the ashes of Gramsci 32

6 Feeling, understanding, knowing: listening 33

7 Voices in the Protestant Cemetery 34

8 The Captain's Testament of CCCP. Empty Words 36

9 Ghosts on via Appia 38

10 From the outer edge of some buried age 42

Chapter 3 Knots and Silence 45

1 Rome smothers. Rome smoulders 45

2 I am acquainted with grief 46

3 Some clues 47

4 Pictorial commotions 49

5 A burial ground 51

Chapter 4 The Ambiguities: Five Blank Pages, Pierre, the Book 53

* Five blank pages 53

A On the unstable equilibrium between writing as creation and writing as end 55

B On reading and knots of reference 57

C On layers 58

D On artifice 59

E On reading 61

Part II

Chapter 5 A Sky Heavy with Clouds. From the Notebooks on Reading 65

5 10 April 2008. Sailors and landscapes 65

4 11 April 2008. A sky heavy with clouds. Anabasis 66

3 11 April 2011. Knots and saving lies 67

2 12 April 2011. Inventio and artificium 68

1 16 April 2011. Clandestine reading 69

Chapter 6 From the Outer Edge of Some Buried Age. From the Notebooks on Writing Sound 71

10 5 February 2011. Something missing 71

9 22 April 2011. Listening 75

8 20, 23, 25 August 2010. Writing sound 78

7 27, 28, 29 April 2011. By heart I hear 81

6 30 April 2011. Connections 85

5 23 January 2011. Reference and layers. 3. May 2011. Maps and deambulations 89

4 5 May 2011. On listening again. On listening, again 91

3 2 December 2010. Finding a voice. Inscape 94

2 7 May 2011. Patterns 97

1 9, 10,11,12 May 2011. Surface and profundity 100

Chapter 7 To the Edge and Falling. From the Notebooks on Writing Sound 105

10 13 May 2011.1 continue to write 105

9 14 May 2011. The ceiling of my making 106

8 15 May 2011. Real see, see real 107

7 16 May 2011. Where? Down There 108

6 17 May 2011. WWI, a palimpsest. A whole cut in five pieces 109

5 26 February 1998. Vigil 110

4 5 March 1998. Cycloptic eye 111

3 25 February 1998. Records or words 112

2 19 May 2011. Addosso 113

1 20 May 2011. Reading, listening, writing. 21 May 2011. Katabasis 115

Part III

Chapter 8 Lament 119

1 My lament 119

2 Lament 120

3 Lacrimosa 123

4 The edges of my inscape 125

5 Broken pieces 127

Chapter 9 End 129

* A whole cut in five pieces 129

* Recordare. To record, to remember 130

* The spiralling coil of this requiem 131

References 133

Selected Bibliography 146