Street Phonography

“There is an undefined zone where the elementary domain of nature - the contingencies - and the territory created by man intersect,” Gilles Clement once wrote in his book Traité succinct de l’art involontaire. The intersection, which has always been central to the author’s discourse, is in this case not exactly a physical place, but a place of interaction regulated by chance.

Certainly, the involuntary artefacts that characterize the aesthetic experience of a place are the results of processes that are most likely to occur where human action is less intentional, or where it was intentional but no longer is. The third landscape, those borderscapes between the urban and the rural, with no clear destination, or the friches, the wastelands, either exhausted or forgotten, or simply unused when not fulfilling their seasonal purpose.

Seaside resorts in winter, remote district roads, urban pockets that have escaped the clutches of touristification are all places that allow the uncontrolled accumulation of debris, the wear and tear of human infrastructures, the unplanned interaction of anthropic remnants with atmospheric agents: with the blow of the wind, the flow of a river, the swell of the sea.

Clement is primarily concerned with the visual realm and the plastic qualities of the physical object. Sounds, by comparison, are much more fragile: they are ephemeral. Once spoken in the wind, they are gone, often leaving no time for a sound amateur to set up a recording device. Attempting to frame them in a compositional discourse robs them of their precious spontaneity, and any subsequent attempt to recreate the conditions under which they occurred will only produce poor and vulgar copies.

Street phonography is the result of years of fishing for the unexpected, of serendipitous recordings made in search of something else, of lucky shots and celestial moments, of faint manifestations of a place’s genius loci, of idle waiting. For this reason, the equipment I have used, as well as the techniques I have employed, and the formats of the recordings cannot be consistent. They depend on what I had at hand in each situation. Sometimes the presence of the recorder is hidden, sometimes it is manifest. Sometimes the microphone is actively used as a tool, probing the space, sometimes it stands still. Sometimes it is a performative gesture that reveals the nature of a space, sometimes it is a casual interpolation of sounds happening by chance.

But the element of coherence that characterizes this collection of sounds, this anthology of moments, is to be found in the inherent nature of the sound material recorded, in its fragility, in its simple, fleeting and unexpected beauty.

— Giuseppe Pisano, 2025

Photo: Beka Javakhisvili.