Di passaggio - project documentation

Di passaggio

- Il treno? Che treno?

- Ha fischiato.

- Ma che diavolo dici?

-Stanotte, signor Cavaliere. Ha fischiato.

L’ho sentito fischiare...

- Il treno?

- Sissignore.

E se sapesse dove sono arrivato!

Il treno ha fischiato Novelle per un anno

L. Pirandello

Di passaggio is a composition of a clip and spatial audio played on a loop. It has been filmed and recorded in many different stations around South Tyrol and it aims to share the feelings these places can convey, especially to frequent travelers. The main feature of this project lies in the ability to share my own feelings and my own experience, leaving - at the same time - freedom of interpretation to the viewer. That is because, although the video shares a singular point of view, on the other hand, the audio allows you to feel part of your own unique story.

-Please take a moment for yourself and try to experience this work in all possible ways.

Inspiration

The idea for this project was born during a daily train journey. Stopping, looking around, listening, and intensely experiencing what surrounds us was the key to understanding what the real goal of this work should be. In the course of that journey, all I had to do was remove my headphones and dwell on what was happening around me to realise that everyday life did not belong to me only, but could be shared with many other people, who in turn may have different experiences of the same place. In the days that followed, having chosen the station as the protagonist for Di passaggio, I was immediately reminded of Pirandello’s novel Il treno ha fischiato (The train has whistled ), a pivotal novella in 20th-century Italian literature. In this text, a trivial event such as a train whistle, which projects the protagonist’s mind into other worlds free of anxieties and worries, is what triggers the desire to rebel against reality, where he, deemed insane by everyone for his behavior, simply claims a space of escape from his unbearable everyday life. That is why I have also chosen to quote a key passage from it on the back cover and use it as inspiration for the entire work.

Research

Semiotics of the work

Di passaggio refrains from using text as an explanation, description, or either part of the work in order to push the visitor to understand the point of view and consequently analysing it from their own point of view. Ferdinand De Saussure examined and explained the difference between language and speech and how they rule all our communication systems. Language denotes a system of internalized, shared rules governing a national language’s vocabulary, grammar, and sound system; speech designates actual oral and written communication by a member or members of a particular speech community. When investigating an artwork si può parlare di code and message, where the first stands for the system, the structure, and the second means the usage, the event. In this work I choose to completely get rid of those two aspects, leaving space for interpretation and to experience. This is because meaning is not transmitted to us, but we actually and actively create it according to an interplay of codes we are unaware of.

Everything we look at or experience in our everyday life is a sign, which means something hiding a message, a feeling or a meaning. Every sign is composed of a signifier and a signified, which De Saussure describes as indicators of ideological functions. The signifier is identifiable as what we actually see or hear, as the container of the message; while the signified can be interpreted as what is behind the sign, the actual message. This work’s signifier consists of clip and audio, working both together and separately since they can be experienced in three different ways. The message hiding behind Di passaggio is more complicated because it can change from viewer to viewer or from listener to listener. From my point of view, it aims to communicate the feelings lived/experienced at the train station, the scenario of most of my time in my life as a traveler, out-oftown student, and mid-distance girlfriend. The composition holds all my points of view, the sound and the objects I often focus on while being in this particular place. My signified here mixes with the visitor’s personal experience of the same place, giving birth to empathy, different feelings and new points of view or maybe details the others have never looked at.

Design process

The ideas

Finding the final idea has been a hard process since in the beginning I was focusing more on the outcome itself rather than on what I wanted to transmit and the place I would have liked to share.

The first idea was working in particular just with sounds, recording the university’s noises to transcript them as a text and linking them to some photos of the places where I was. What I was not considering was the meaning behind my action of translation from audio to text. After I considered realising some postcards from all the places that I would have visited during my semester abroad, following On Kawara’s example, and sending them to my parents with the place and date. Here, the problem with this idea was the inconsistency of the message and also non describing a precise place but putting many of them together without linking.

In the end, I realised I needed to focus on one single place, being there and spending some time to understand what did that place mean to me. So I had this idea while I was on a train, I immediately stopped the music in my headphones and started looking curious around and listening to all the noise around me. It was actually delightful and all this made me think about how much time I spend at the train station waiting, running, or looking around. I decided to share my feelings related to what I see and what I hear at train stations, mixing my point of view with the others’.

Recording around South-Tyrol

Both video and audio were recorded in South Tyrol, as it is one of the places I frequent most. In particular, the Bolzano station is the protagonist, as it is the starting and finishing point for any journey. The various elements were collected on different days, coinciding with my travels, in order to make the result as faithful as possible to reality. A Nikon reflex camera was used for filming, while for the audio a recorder with two stereo condenser microphones was used to reach even the lowest sounds. It took about three weeks to get all the material needed for post-production.

The challenge of post-production

Since post-production is not my forte, the realisation of this project was an excellent opportunity to learn how to use new software and improve some of my skills in this area.

The choice of clips and the realisation of the whole video part was what took the least amount of time, as it shows simply my personal experience and the natural progression of events. The most challenging part was the realisation of the spatial audio. Especially because it is already very complex to be able to convey what one hears first-hand through recordings. Realising spatial audio requires the use of two different listening lines, which meant not only figuring out how to put the various sounds together so that they remained distinguishable but also being able to balance where they came from.

This project aims to be immersive, but above all to be able to convey through different channels such as sight, hearing, or both at the same time my message while still allowing the viewer to have a personalised experience.

University: Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Faculty: Design and Art

Course: Visual Communication

Thomas Mayfried, Michele Galluzzo, Emanuela De Cecco

Year: 2022

Student: Martina Monterisi