RADIO THAT MATTERS – Alessandro Bosetti

Alessandro Bosetti,

La memoria risiede nel lobo dell’orecchio / Memory resides in the earlobe

Think of a remembered or imagined sound, switch it on in your thoughts, listen to it in your mind…

A journey in-and-out, using sound as a connecting tool between acoustic evocation and creation. Composer and sound artist Alessandro Bosetti builds a hypothetical “Palace of Memory,” a physical and imaginary space containing sound memories connected to life stories, created in collaboration with a community of blind and visually impaired people attending A.S.P. Sant'Alessio Margherita di Savoia.

Bustles, sighs, melodies and words. Vicissitudes attached, like a skin, to certain sounds that resurface from a desired, rewritten, celebrated past. A place perhaps only mental, where certain memories are rediscovered as needed through meditations, exercises and experiments for which one must close one's eyes. What does an unforgettable sound sounds like?

Behind every imagined or remembered sound is a real sound but also a memory and emotion, perhaps a story. Sound is the key to opening a drawer, finding the threads of an affair, a friendship or perhaps a trauma.

Sonic writing emerges from a convocation of sounds, and works to reconstruct, transform, reshape, and recompose them in the mind and heart. For both the listeners and the author, it is a matter of going in search of the emotions that among the sounds allow us to remember some and forget others, moving lightly in the territory between oblivion and auditory hallucination. 

The title of the work draws inspiration from Maurizio Bettini's book Rome, City of Words. Orality Memory Law Religion Poetry (Einaudi, 2022).

Memory resides in the earlobe takes its cue from a sound performance made as part of the Short Theatre festival and the European project Radio That Matters. The audio presented here is the first episode of a two installment radio version for Radio3 Rai that was originally aired on Saturday January 11th and Sunday January 12th, 2025. 

With the voices and words of Marco Guardati, Sonia Gioia, Giovanni Florio, Alessio Federici, Nikolaj Llevliev, Gianluigi degli Atti thanks to Piersandra Di Matteo, Francesco Di Stefano, Matteo Angius, Marzia Bonacci.

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Alessandro Bosetti is a composer and sound artist whose work focuses on the musicality inherent in language and the voice as an independent object. He also produces pieces using radio as a medium and artwork focused on the art of listening. Bosetti’s music is included in the programs of numerous festivals including: Festival d’Automne in Paris, Eclat Festival in Stuttgart, Présences Electroniques festival of the GRM in Paris, Liquid Architecture Festival in Melbourne, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Musica Festival in Strasbourg and Ruido Festival in Buenos Aires. His music is the subject of numerous recorded publications on labels such as Xong, Kohlhaas, Errant Bodies Press, Holidays Records, Unsounds and Monotype, which in 2016 dedicated a retrospective box set to him (4 CDs). His book Thèses / Voix – a collection of texts between theory, poetry and score was published in 2021 by Les presses du réel. A vinyl version of FasFari – the most recent episode of his Plane/Talea series – as well as the Portraits des Voix CD have just been released by Xong and Kohlhaas Records.

The ASP S. Alessio - Margherita di Savoia is a historic institution that, since the second half of the nineteenth century, has been carrying out activities aimed at the social inclusion of the blind and visually impaired, in the fields of health, education, employment and social services, throughout the Lazio Region and at its offices in Rome, Frosinone and Latina. 

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.