Leopoldo Siano und Shushan Hyusnunts (Theatrum Phonosophicum)

Once upon a time, there was a river in Naples that disappeared. The ancient Greeks called it “Sepeithos”. If you put yourself in a state of deep listening, its sound is still audible... The work in progress SEPEITHOS is a project created during the research residency of the theatrum phonosophicum at the Nitsch Museum Naples (Fondazione Morra) 2023-2025.

This workshop uses sound examples and listening exercises to teach listening as a creative activity. Through a “mythical method” of free associations between the abstract and the concrete, traditional knowledge is combined with experimental practices: from ancient cosmogonies to deep listening, from soundscape to musique concrète and acousmatique, from sound poetry to “cinema for the ears”. Technology as “applied magic” can paradoxically lead the listener back to the source of being and enchant the world anew.

“In the beginning was the action” is how Faust translates the incipit of the Gospel of John in Goethe's magnum opus. Every act, even the smallest and quietest - everything that happens - inevitably has to do with sound. “Something always happens”... If - as Hermann Nitsch said - theater is the precursor of action art, music is the precursor of sound art. This performative reading attempts to tell the multifaceted history of sound actionism and to grasp its essence: from John Cage to Joseph Beuys, from Fluxus to Viennese Actionism, from Henning Christiansen to Walter Marchetti, from Giuseppe Chiari to Alvin Curran, and so on. Theatrum phonosophicum is a research and life project by Leopoldo Siano and Shushan Hyusnunts that aims to share knowledge in a sensual way and to create experiential spaces in which traditional knowledge comes into contact with experimental practices. It strives for a synthesis of different forms of artistic expression - the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art” (from Richard Wagner to the avant-garde and beyond). At the center of theatrum phonosophicum is sound and the practice of listening - understood in a broader sense as an “ecology of the mind”.

Afterwards, the nitsch museum invites you to bread and wine.