Marco Donnarumma

Niranthea is a hybrid short film combining documentary, audiovisual synaesthesia and AI hearing algorithms to tackle the notions of deafhood, prosthesis and cyborg. It offers a poetic reflection on the unlearning of normative conceptions of sound and body technology. It does so directly through the unscripted ideas, thoughts and experiences of a group of six d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The dialogues were filmed after five months of communal research, during which the group had engaged in regular conversations and research sessions mediated by artist Marco Donnarumma – himself late-deafened.

This process of sharing, analysis and intimate reflection served to create a new voice that is one and multiple at once. The title symbolises this multiplicity: Niranthea is, in fact, an acronym of the letters found in the first names of the members of the working group, Adriane, Ann-Catrin, Mara, Martin, Wojciech. Through their different voices, Niranthea becomes a multiform identity, a pluripotent and plurisensitive body of perception.

The knowledge embodied by Niranthea strives to describe an incredibly wide rage of sonic experiences that do not have anything to do with “hearing” as most commonly intended. Such experiences go well beyond the dominating audist understanding of sound perception and thus inevitably trigger urgent questions on the relationship between sites of power and disabled bodies, self-empowerment, misunderstanding and the role of technology in this ecology.

Donnarumma’s long-term focus on body technologies and AI prostheses is significantly renewed and expanded here. Whereas traditionally, cyborg art and posthuman art offer conceptual, idealised or hyperboled perspectives on what a cyborg body really means, this work breaks with that tradition by confronting the real life experience of those using – or, importantly, choosing not to use – those very prostheses; people who live with them inside their bodies as an ambiguous mark of both their own identity and the isolation they are subjected to by the hearing world.

The uncompromising conversations and accounts of the group members are complemented, emphasised and perceptually manifested through a carefully crafted sonic and visual experience drifting through and, sometimes, radically abstracting landscape imagery and audio field recordings of the icelandic wilderness. In delicately combining personal accounts and AI-based sound design, the film offers a journey through a multitude of alternative perceptions of sound: its fleeting presence, its seeming absence and the innumerable, potential states of being it fosters.

Niranthea is part of the series I Am Your Body (2022-present). An English and a German version are available for screenings and exhibitions, as well as for screening in educational contexts. A video teaser can be viewed below.