Allow me to tell you a short story about a collaboration between composer Luigi Nono, architect Renzo Piano, and philosopher Massimo Cacciari that resulted in Prometheus: Tragedy of Listening, performed in 1984, in Venice, Italy.

In Nono’s own words, Venice was the acoustic multiverse in which he operated. Water is a key element of this multiverse. Sounds reaching from different directions are the signs of life, inviting work, and participation.

The Venetian laguna soundscape of industrial production is reflected in Prometheus.

The ability to listen to spaces reflects the greater ability to participate in humanity’s strife for social justice, emblematically represented in the figure of Prometheus. Listening is part of the ethical engagement with societal struggles.

Nono covers his left eye with a music sheet referencing the mobility of a sound that is heard but cannot be seen. The composer intended to break the fixity of stage and audience relations in traditional Western theatres based on the dominance of vision, to turn it into what the human condition of listening affords when sounds originating in a plurality of sources reflect in multidirectional ways: far/near, above/below, spatialized through interaction. Every listener is at the centre of a unique experience, where space is architectural, musical, and social all at the same time. The mythological condition of Prometheus evoked by Nono is a call for the awakening of human consciousness.

Nono did not aim at creating a unified whole, but rather a diversified multiplicity, attained through real-time responses of performers listening to one another, to space, and everything around them. Their visualizations of sound paths in musical scores and architectural sketches in plans and sections were based on sensory associations of one sense modality with another through the use of coloured notations allowing for chromesthesia—a silent “colour hearing” through “sound seeing.” Scores and sketches do not represent a static reality but rather anticipate time and sound, however ephemerally. As allographic arts, music and architecture are developed through an interposed representational medium used to invite participation between interdisciplinary collaborators.

Nono believed that it was necessary to “learn to live with the plurality of times and spaces, with multiplicities and with differences.”

In spaces for listening, ideas are shared, debated, taken apart, or augmented.

The Ark was designed by Piano to stand freely in the space of the church of San Lorenzo in Venice. This was an acoustic choice since the gap between the Ark and the interior church walls defined a double volume for sound reflections; it became possible to hear two spaces: one internal (the wooden Ark) and the other external (the walled stone church). The Ark was composed of three levels of footbridges that allowed live sound and live electronics to be played at different levels in the space. Piano’s Ark is a musical instrument and not just a stage.

The second performance of Prometheus took place in a disused industrial factory in Milan (1985) rather than a performance venue.

You are invited to realize a space for active participation, where spatialized sound and embodied experience are essential. Indeed, architects are called to listen not just to space, collaborators, and their craft in a collective effort but also to socio-political events. Listening invites to create empathic connections. It is a radical practice that requires a readiness to make changes.

Federica Goffi, Interim Director