Silvia Rosani: T-O

Silvia Rosani was born in Trieste, already a major port and trading town in antiquity and one of Italy’s most multicultural cities today, which transformed from a peripheral site into an important transit and absorption location for many Eastern Europeans after the eastward opening of the European Union. But Silvia Rosani also spends a great deal of time in Apulia, where she is confronted with the upsetting and desperate situation of African refugees who have managed to reach Italy via the Mediterranean Sea. It is to these people, whom she also encounters in person in the refugee camps–‘ghettoes’, as the inhabitants themselves call them–that her work T-O is dedicated: those stranded in Europe, those who never reach their goal and those who can reach it physically, but never truly arrive in their minds.
‘T-O’ is the name of a type of early medieval world map, on which the three continents known at the time–Asia, Europe and Africa–are surrounded by the primal ocean and separated by the ‘great’ sea and the ‘Mediterranean’ sea. The latter is represented by the short line of the letter ‘T’ and separates Africa from Europe. In the interpretation of the Church Fathers of the time, however, the ‘T’ also stood for theos (God) and the ‘O’ for okeanos, while a secular interpretation saw it as the Terrarum Orbis. But the image also served to describe the Roman campaigns against Africa–which was the composer’s reason for choosing the map as a symbol of her piece.
‘Today,’ says Silvia Rosani, ‘the question is how the crossing transforms the wide space of the sea, where the sounds go on a long journey into the narrow boundaries of consciousness, where thoughts and memories multiply and repeat themselves like echoes in a compulsive mechanism. Sometimes the physical goal can be reached, but the sea monster described in the Christian apocalypse to discourage seafaring, with its seven heads and ten horns, becomes a reverberating delusion.’
Silvia Rosani creates the ‘wide space of the sea’ by placing the two groups of singers far apart from one another. Two high voices embody the travellers, and a game of calls and responses with the other three singers (are they waiting at the shore, or are they echoes from the rocks?) unfolds across the audience. An echoing space opens up for subtle sounds which the composer–very much in the tradition of the Italian masters of sonic sensuality–finds in order to portray a dream world, a limbo between post-traumatic apathy and a tentative arrival in reality.
These sounds emerge from the sea breeze on the ship’s deck, evoked through breathing and hissing sounds, where the travellers look towards their goal; sounds in which one hears the hesitance of the refugees, whose consciousness has become lost somewhere in the expanse of the sea.