The artist Marco Donnarumma has created =an exacting and sinuous ritual of sensory reorganisation in his solo performance »Ex Silens.« The work delves into the corporeal knowledge hiding at the edges of experience. It is a dreamlike encounter, yet raw and real. It is a reminiscence, a reverie surging through real-life accounts of modes of perception that are systematically rejected by the imperative of the normal. Here, cochlear implants, AI hearing algorithms, and amplifiers are extracted from their capitalist chain of production and subverted to create prostheses with their own agencies. Radically intimate, the prostheses are organs of sharing: they amplify sounds from the performer’s muscle, heartbeat, and blood flow, diffuse vibrations through the bodies of audience and performer, and in doing so, resonate sensible forms of being.
Expanding on »Ex Silens,« Donnarumma will present a short film, Niranthea, 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 through the unscripted ideas, thoughts, and experiences of a group of six d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people with whom Donnarumma worked with during a first phase of his project, at Pact Zollverein. The film will be screened twice, first with German, then English subtitles. Following each screening, Donnarumma will give a short talk and Q&A. DGS German sign-language interpretation will be available during the German-language talk and discussion.
