In a night
Composed between 2023 and 2025, In a Night is an imaginary journey through the mountains of Sicily, Piedmont, Valle d’Aosta and Provence — into their life, their evenings, nights and early mornings.
It is the account of many walks and stays, of an act of political resistance that begins with taking time: moving, observing, listening to the world around us. An act that leads to the awareness of being merely a node in a rich net, a human presence in a non-human world.
Ultimately, it is the story of a possible dialogue and relationship — and of the yearning to dissolve into the otherness encountered, to simply fade away and cease.
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The exploration
The journey began in Sicily and continued through the mountains I have encountered and frequented throughout my life, in Northern Italy and France, and with the peculiar encounters they offered during my mostly nocturnal explorations: the hundreds of toads that covered my feet, slipping inside the recorder bag in a kind of orgiastic ritual that had not anticipated a witness; the alpine crickets; the streams, rivers and small waterfalls; the melting ice inside the ruins of Fort Chaberton; the dormice and the foxes. All ordinary, small, unshowy sounds — sounds that create and define the spaces surrounding us, the extra-human at the threshold of the human. No exoticism, no documentary aestheticisation, no sought-after wow effect. Simply listening, and finding one’s own place in doing so.
Since the guiding principle was proximity and local exploration, the selection of locations follows a biographical logic. All the places I explored are in regions where I have lived, and I applied a similar methodology to each: searching for wetlands or former humid areas nearby, often in mountain regions, reaching them on foot, staying for multiple days, and returning several times. This gave me the opportunity to record across different seasons and with different focuses. The project, however, does not aim to be scientifically accurate — the outcome is a long-form composition that speaks to a relationship with places, rather than documenting their environmental condition.
- Candia Canavese: a historical region of Piedmont between Turin and Ivrea, flat and rich in wetlands and rice paddies, valuable reserves of biodiversity.
- Parco del Mont Avic: established in 1989 to preserve one of the region’s wildest areas: the upper basin of the Chalamy stream in the municipality of Champdepraz.
- Forte dello Chaberton: the highest fort in Europe (3140m), built during the First World War by the Italians and captured by the French in the same period.
- Nebrodi and Madonie: my first mountains, their biodiversity constantly threatened by drought and large-scale arson fires.
- Paradiso delle rane (Frogs’ Paradise): a high-altitude pond (1240m) rich in amphibian fauna, in particular home to one of the highest colonies of the common frog.
- Stagno di Pré: a low-mountain pond seriously threatened by drought in Piedmont, in one of the areas most renowned for its abundance of water.
All the recordings were made between 2022 and 2025 in mountain and wetland areas, attending to both the resilience of microfauna and ecosystems and the profound transformations wrought by climate change.