Marco Donnarumma

What is deafness if not another mode of perception? What is a cyborg if not an exploded mirror of today’s corporeal experience? Ex Silens combines movement, sound, space and technology to dive deep into the corporeal knowledge at the edges of experience.

The piece invites audiences into a radically alternative sensorium, a perceptual place where the “normal” does not exist. Here they encounter an otherworldly, ingenuous creature and a bare bones, posthuman totem. With the audience as accomplices, the creature and the totem touch and fuse with one another, entering a material, sonic, and conceptual feedback.

Tender and extreme at once, Ex Silens is a ritual of sensory reorganization. Music and light stem from biosensors on the performer’s body, creating a synesthetic relation between movement, sound and light. The audiovisual composition, experienced through eight subwoofers, an ambisonic speaker system and a rig of interactive lights, produce trance-inducing seismic waves, while a choreography of touch, caresses and improvised interactions unites audience and performer in a strange and engrossing intimacy.

Cochlear implants and AI hearing algorithms are extracted from their capitalist black box, subverted and turned into sonic organs, biomachines with their own agencies. They respond to the creature’s movement, mingle with the public and amplify sounds from muscles, heart and blood to physically diffuse them, literally, through the bodies of audience.

These new organs, conceived and handcrafted by the artist, are far from individual aiding tools; they are organs of sharing. They do not try to repair a loss, but rather magnify a kaleidoscopic sound world that has always been there, mobilizing thus collective, sensible forms of being.

Ex Silens offers a complete audiovisual experience to d/Deaf and hearing audiences. Each individual can participate in the performance according to their sensory configurations. Ex Silens is part of I Am Your Body (2022-present), a series of works investigating deafness, sound, and (artificial) intelligence through research driven by d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people and facilitated by Donnarumma – himself late-deafened.