On Air - On Site : 48 Hours of Radio Art

Airing on May 23rd 19:30 CEST
Non prendermi alla lettera (Come se ci fosse qualcosa da vedere)
Genre: Radio Drama
Duration: 15 min
Radio play produced by Agon, 2025.

The work originates from Una lettera, a poetic prose text by Sebastiano Diciassette, presented in two versions, Italian and German.
As the title suggests, it takes the form of an epistolary composition addressed to an absent beloved. The radio play seeks to move the theme of love beyond the projective dimension of the couple relationship, in search of a more universal meaning. In the experience of a single man, the whole of humanity may unfold. Hence the choice to entrust the text to one male voice and four female voices, creating a short circuit between timbral quality and grammatical gender and, ultimately, avoiding any constriction of the discourse on affective dynamics.
The female voices correspond to four declensions of the archetype of the Anima: Eve, Helen, Mary and Sophia, representing respectively instinctual, passionate, maternal and sapiential love.
Two levels emerge. One is intimate, in which, going beyond literal meaning, the protagonist feels he has lost his own soul – “There is no SOUL here,” the author declares. The beloved woman appears merely as the medium of a much broader search, concerning contact with the most sensitive and fragile part of the self, the part that Carl Gustav Jung called Seele. The other level, of a collective nature, concerns the possibility of finding one’s own voice in a deafened world; hence the choice to employ three different registers of reading, later fused in the compositional process: voiceless, half-voice, full voice.

Featuring:

Elena Ghigas

Italian sound artist and composer, she is also a Jungian psychoanalyst and a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (Zurich), as well as a professor of Phenomenology of Art at the Centro Italiano di Psicologia Analitica (Rome). She previously taught Spatial Sound Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bari (Italy), before leaving the position to focus on her compositional work.

She graduated one year early from a classical high school with honors. She holds degrees in Piano and Clinical Psychology, both with honors, and a PhD in Neuroscience, focusing on sound motion and brain plasticity induced by musical training.

Her compositions have been selected and awarded in international festivals and institutions, including Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Neue Musik in St. Ruprecht (Vienna), Sicronie Headscape (Milan), Tempo Reale (Florence), Quadriennale di Roma, MA/IN (Italy), Prix Russolo (France), Urticanti (Italy), Landscape24 / Zeugma (Italy), A voce alta / Agon (Milan), Paysage Composés (Grenoble), Sound/Image (London), Évora_27 (Portugal), and MoMA (New York).

Her research focuses on the relationship between sound, the brain, and the psyche. She is drawn to indeterminacy and the fragility of “dirty” sounds, and conceives listening as a liminal process between the audible and the inaudible. She is the author of three monographs and several scientific publications, and has recently developed a collaborative project on spatial audio at the Inter Arts Center, Lund University (Malmö).

Her latest works have been released by the label Silentes.

elenaghigas.tumblr.com

22-24 May 2026 - 48hours of Radio Art +6