Gendered Metaphors of Territorial Subordination, Theologies of Independence and Images of a Liberated Future: Sodaro & Di Bella’s Làssami as a Sicilian Decolonial Allegory

International audienceThe short film Làssami (“leave me”) was directed by Gianluca Sodaro in 2015, and functions as a music video to the eponymous song by Giuseppe Di Bella, who also acts in the film. In this article, I attempt to decipher Làssami’s encounter of lyrics, music, sound effects and images. In the first part of the article, I discuss the reproduction of stereotypical images of Sicilian masculinity perpetrated by the film, also drawing on recent media releases. I then work my way through the intricate web of trappings associated to the representation of the female characters in the film – as passive, innocent, celestial, and white. In the second part of the article, I attempt to reinterpret the film in light of the decolonial concept of “de-linking”. I argue that Làssami’s symbolical coding, regardless of the authors’ intentions, refers precisely to a silenced desire for sovereignty and independence

Enclaves of Whiteness: Disquieting Presences and Domesticated Territories in the Sicilian Archipelago

Filmic representations of Sicily and Sicilians often cast them as peripheral supplements within the general action. In the case studies I examine in this chapter, entirely based on films set in the minor islands of the Sicilian archipelago, this peripherality corresponds customarily to exoticised, racio-gendered Otherness. In this context, these discontinuous portions of Sicilian land are characterised as purified enclaves of whiteness at the exclusive disposal of the white characters. There, Sicilians only function as silenced servants, obedient helpers that mediate communication with the locals, or disquieting presences that are always on the brink of acting mischievously against the protagonists

107 Days and Counting...

In this essay, I reflect on my experience of social/physical distancing in Brazil, one of the current epicentres of the COVID-19 pandemic. I draw upon Achille Mbembe and Denise Ferreira da Silva to explore how necropolitics underpins the Brazilian Government’s response to the crisis, framed by a colonial and racialised logic that privileges whiteness and trivialises the deaths of Brazilians. I conclude the essay by making reference to my track 107 jorna (107 days), written on 1 July (and premiered online by the Glasgow-based Lights Out Listening Group), where I combine Sicilian speech and electronic noise in order to articulate my own astonishment, impatience and indignation with the current situation

Icarus Ensemble at hcmf//: Interview with Marco Pedrazzini

Icarus Ensemble was founded in 1994 in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Since then, they've been performingbasically everywhere in the world, giving a tremendous contribution to contemporary music in Italyand abroad. At hcmf// 2011 they present two concerts: the European Composers Spotlight onWednesday 23 November and the programme of Romitelli works on Thursday 24 November.Marco Pedrazzini, cofounderand artistic director of the ensemble, speaks to Marcello Messina, whohas been working with the ensemble this year as a composer on the European Composers'Professional Development Programme (ECPDP).Icarus Ensemble was founded in 1994 in Reggio Emilia, Italy. Since then, they've been performingbasically everywhere in the world, giving a tremendous contribution to contemporary music in Italyand abroad. At hcmf// 2011 they present two concerts: the European Composers Spotlight onWednesday 23 November and the programme of Romitelli's works on Thursday 24 November.Marco Pedrazzini, cofounder and artistic director of the ensemble, speaks to Marcello Messina, who has been working with the ensemble this year as a composer on the European Composers' Professional Development Programme (ECPDP)

The Ubimus Symposium in 2022, peeking into the musical past

Twelve years, twelve events. Despite the well-established tradition of our community to get together, share results and challenge partners with unexpected new threads, this year opens a new stage. After much discussion, the Ubiquitous Music Group decided to take up Teresa Connor’s proposal and coined a new name for our event, The Ubiquitous Music Symposium. Following the nice experiences of hybrid and remote events held in Porto Seguro, Bahia, Brazil in 2020 and Porto, Portugal, in 2021, this year our community decided to fully embrace the remote modality. The event was hosted by our partners at the State University of Paraná (Unespar), located in Curitiba, Brazil, under the able coordination of Felipe de Almeida Ribeiro

Ubiquitous Music, Gelassenheit and the Metaphysics of Presence: Hijacking the Live Score Piece Ntrallazzu 4

International audienceOriginally composed by Marcello Messina, Ntrallazzu is a cycle of pieces for live score and electronics built on Max, and involving various instrumental line-ups. In particular, Ntrallazzu 4 was performed by Luzilei Aliel on the pífano and electric guitar in São João del Rei during the VIII UbiMus workshop. Aliel's particular setup also involved a further layer of processing: namely, the usage of Pure Data alongside Ableton Live in order to literally hijack the original piece and open a whole set of unforeseen possibilities that abundantly transcend the original intentions. In this paper, we signify our experience by means of the concept of comprovisation, while we situate Ntrallazzu 4 within the domain of ubiquitous music. Furthermore, we make use of the Heideggerian concept of Gelassenheit and of the Derridean concept of Metaphysics of Presence (as reformulated by Joseph Pugliese) in order to make sense of the piece

'Mezzogiorno di fuoco e sangue': Narratives of Organized Crime and Stereotypes of the South in Songs from Northern and Central Italy

Popular Italian culture has grown ever more interested in the interpenetration between organized crime, state activities and transnational economic processes. However, while these narratives productively analyse—and denounce—the macroeconomic processes underscoring illegal and harmful practices, they also often complement such economic analyses by perpetuating stereotypical characterizations of the people involved in the crimes. In this article, I analyse popular music across five decades, in order to assess the ways in which the denunciation of state crime is persistently connected with clichéd representations of the modes of existence that allegedly characterize Southern Italian populations. Focussing on acclaimed political songs by Northern and Central Italian acts, namely I Giganti, Fabrizio De André, Litfiba, Frankie Hi-NRG and Fabrizio Moro, the article identifies the textual, musical and extra-musical elements that resort to stereotyping Southern Italians in order to make a point about state-driven illegality. I argue that this type of ethnically biased narrative may paradoxically result in a symbolic absolution of the State, in a way that all responsibility for illicit and harmful practices is attributed to Southern communities

The Internet of Musical Stuff (IoMuSt): ubimus perspectives on artificial scarcity, virtual communities and (de)objectification

Part of the recent developments in Ubiquitous Music (ubimus) research involve the proposal of the Internet of Musical Stuff (IoMuSt) as an expansion and complement to the Internet of Musical Things (IoMusT). The transition from IoMusT to IoMuSt entails a critique of blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as technologies for allotment, disciplination and regimentation of formerly open and freely accessible artistic web content. In brief, the replacement of the operative concepts constructed around “things” with strategies based on “stuff” highlights the underlying interconnected processes and factors that impact interaction and usage, pointing to resources that become disposable and valueless within an objectified and monetized musical internet. This conceptual and methodological turn allows us to deal with distributed-creativity phenomena in marginalized spaces, highlighting the role of resources that are widely reproducible, fluid and ever-changing. In this paper, we address IoMuSt-based responses to issues such as the artificial production of scarcity associated with the application of NFTs. The selected musical examples showcase the meshwork of dynamic relationships that characterizes ubimus research. In particular, we focus on a comprovisation project involving VOIP visual communication through Skype, Meet and Zoom, a ubimus experience involving a Telegram chatbot and a set of musical experiments enabled by an online tool for remote live patchin

Novos cenários, ordens mundiais futuras e geocorpografias da alteridade: uma análise crítica do viés etnocêntrico em estudos sobre configurações futuras do mundo

Neste trabalho, recorro à análise crítica do discurso para avaliar a justaposição entre a categoria obscura de “democracia liberal” e os epítetos usados para descrever líderes de governo em países não ocidentais em ascensão, avaliando também o papel das caracterizações regionais e étnico-raciais na a formulação desses epítetos. Minha atenção, neste trabalho, será limitada a dois importantes trabalhos da primeira metade da década de 2010, a dizer, o livro No One’s World de Charles A. Kupchan7 e o artigo The Illusion of Geopolitics: The Enduring Power of the Liberal Order de G. John Ikenberry.8 As datas dessas duas publicações são importantes em vista da argumentação que irei propor na parte final do presente trabalho, já que coincidem com o primeiro mandato presidencial de Dilma Rousseff no Brasil, e precedem o importante discurso da mesma na 69° Assembléia Geral da ONU, em setembro de 2014, em Nova Iorque. Esse discurso de Dilma vai ser contraposto aos trabalhos mencionados acima, em particular ao livro de Kupchan

Tri custioni: reductio ad absurdum e teologia da colonização

International audienceA composição Tri custioni, para dois tenores e piano, foi estreada em Macapá em novembro de 2017, durante o VI SIMA. A peça é inspirada na leitura da obra Os Irmãos Karamazov de Fiódor Dostoiévski. A peça foi concebida a partir da composição de várias gerações de sílabas, usadas como material vocal mas também como baricentro semiótico da composição, que desobedece, de alguma forma, à supremacia do conjunto altura/duração, normalmente contemplado como verdadeira essência da música. A partir da rebelião de Ivan Karamazov e das suas implicações no contexto do campo crítico/programático da decolonialidade, a peça desobedece também a possibilidade de uma conciliação entre colonizados e colonizadores, vista como perspectiva perversa de esquecimento da violência perpetrada. Ao contrário, e mesmo colocando a enunciação fônica ao centro do próprio arsenal expressivo, a peça rejeita, fragmenta e destrói a linguagem, entendida como logos do invasor, como ferramenta colonial de imposição de uma ordem simbólica alheia. Palavras-chave: Composição; Desobediência; Reductio ad absurdum. 1. Introdução A composição Tri custioni ("três inquietações" ou "três questões" em siciliano), para dois tenores e piano, foi estreada em Macapá em novembro de 2017, durante o VI Simpósio Internacional de Música na Amazônia (SIMA 2017). A peça é inspirada na leitura da obra Os Irmãos Karamazov de Fiódor Dostoiévski (1970 [1879-80]), e em particular no livro V (DOSTOIÉVSKI, 1970, p. 217-284), isto é, a seção onde se desencadeia a rebelião de Ivan Karamazov. O discurso indignado de Ivan Karamazov parte da acusação contra o conceito cristão de salvação, segundo o qual, no fim dos tempos, todas as injustiças do mundo serão redimidas e o projeto divino será revelado: contra este dogma, Ivan defende a irredutibilidade das ofensas contra as(os) inocentes, recusando qualquer possibilidade de redenção e preferindo se rebelar contra Deus e renunciar à salvação. A reductio ad absurdum deste discurso consiste na projeção de um cenário distópico, contido no quinto capítulo, "O Grande Inquisidor" (DOSTOIÉVSKI, 1970, p. 251-269). Nesse cenário distópico, situado cronologicamente não no futuro e sim na época da Inquisição Espanhola, o livre arbítrio foi eliminado do mundo e a humanidade foi reduzida à escravidão por um organismo supremo de poder (a Igreja), eliminando qualquer possível fonte do mal e concedendo a felicidade a todos os seres humanos