In this conversation, Giorgio Mega talks with Manfredi Clemente after his residency at Fondazione Studio Rizoma. Starting from Horoi, a sound project and installation, they delve into the conceptual and political threads running through Clemente’s artistic practice: sound as a relational tool, ecology as complex thinking, and art as a means rather than an end.
Giorgio Mega:
When we presented Horoi, the sound project and installation, there was so much to unpack that it was impossible to fully explore the ideas and values that underpin your research and practice beyond this specific work. Getting straight to the point, let me ask you now: what are your thoughts on the relationship between sound, ecology, and politics? Let’s begin with the first intersection. Sound ecology is a well-established discipline, yet it’s often treated more from a research (or academic) perspective than as a practical one. What does it mean to you for a sonic practice to be an ecological one?
Manfredi Clemente:
I could answer that question in many ways, all of which would be partially accurate but, inevitably insufficient. So I’d rather start by describing the value that sound holds for me and for my practice. I believe sound places us in a very specific and largely underestimated mode of relating to the world. Unlike vision—which, due to optical limitations, must maintain a certain distance from objects (when you bring something too close to your eye, it goes out of focus), sound makes distance intimate. Its vibrational nature engages not just the auditory system but the whole body: sound passes through us, resonates within us, and deeply connects what is near and far. This deeply physical quality translates, for me, into sound’s unique and meaningful capacity to place us in the world. Sound allows the “other” to reach us and touch us, despite the distance. Precisely because of this primary physical and spatial dimension, I believe sound can play a central role in representing and nurturing relational practices—both on tangible levels (territories, environments, individuals) and on intangible yet equally real levels (such as social or political space). When I present a work in a space, I alter that environment and have the potential to prompt those who inhabit it to temporarily rewrite their relationship with the world. This potential increases if the process of creating the work is itself relational—entailing reciprocal listening to places and people, to objects and realities. The ways in which this potential manifests are many and deeply dependent on the work and the process behind it. It’s hard to generalize, but one can at least imagine the complex web of relationships such a process can activate. In a project like Horoi, I didn’t consider sound the final goal of my inquiry into the territory. I used it as a tool and method for analysis and research, precisely because of this extraordinary potential. A method for investigating and realizing the relationships that define an environment is, by nature, an ecological method. A process that makes this investigation public—even if only momentarily focusing an audience’s attention on specific environmental relational themes—is a political process.
G.M.: Right, so when discussing each of these elements, it’s inevitable to consider their relational aspects, both conceptually and in terms of practices that involve and encourage contact and exchange with humans and non-humans alike. So now I’d like to ask you about ecology. Unlike sound, it’s increasingly invoked as a framework for interpreting environments—though sometimes in instrumentalized or superficial ways. What is ecology to you, when taken “seriously”?
M.C.: I like to think that much of the current popularity of the term “ecology”, beyond the urgency of climate change, comes from a growing need for complex thinking. This need arises in response to ongoing attacks on critical thought—often grounded in the oversimplification of social and political phenomena. I believe current neoliberal and authoritarian narratives depend on staying on the surface of meaning, avoiding depth—what someone might call a kind of phantasmagoria or reification. Ecology, in contrast, offers ways of resisting this trend. To your question, I’d say ecological thinking is the ability to read the world on two simultaneous levels: horizontal and vertical. Much like in early polyphony, where independent melodic lines progressed autonomously while also generating vertical harmonies, so too in territories, landscapes, and inhabited spaces, we find independent but interconnected paths—each with rich individual complexity and a simultaneous capacity—and necessity—to align symbiotically with parallel trajectories. These alignments, as Anna Tsing aptly notes, are often fleeting, fragile, and precarious, but grasping those vertical moments is crucial for a deep understanding of reality. A perspective that accounts for both the horizontal and vertical, along with the inherent precarities of their relationships, is an ecological reading of reality. And I think such an approach should not be limited to studying ecosystems in a strictly biological sense, nor confined to specific environments—the city, the forest—but should instead embrace forms that connect spatial production processes, as identified long ago by Henri Lefebvre, with the analysis of landscape and environment. It should establish constant connections between the particular and the general, the tangible and intangible, the concrete and the abstract. I also believe that it’s the responsibility of ecological thinking to show that ecosystem alterations are constant mechanisms—to highlight their (often devastating) criticalities but also to emphasize the evolutionary opportunities they create. And yes, to propose positive models, to open up alternative narratives by referencing ignored or taken-for-granted interconnections. It’s in this spirit that art can contribute. In fact, I believe it already is—by transforming itself and, as I said earlier, becoming a method and a means rather than an end.
G.M.: I agree that an approach which is transversal, deep, and connected to lived experience gives ecology more substance. And thank you for the perfect segue in saying that art is becoming more of a “method and means rather than an end.” That leads us directly into the third concept I wanted to explore in relation to your practice and thinking: politics. Again, as with ecology, there’s politics and there’s politics, ranging from meaningful engagement to token gestures and greenwashing. The age-old question of whether art is political by nature or whether it must serve politics remains open. But in a time when many of us (especially those engaged with these issues) experience a growing sense of helplessness and injustice in the face of power’s blinding disregard, not just in environmental crises but even in the face of an ongoing genocide, broadcast live what can be done with art as a means rather than an end? And should art always carry this kind of diplomatic cover, this passport?
M.C.: I believe it was Colin Ward who described anarchism as a necessary idealism (something diffuse and pervasive), an internal social tension that resurfaces in a multitude of spontaneous forms. Even when not explicitly named, it seems to fuel all those grassroots, horizontal initiatives that help keep alive a collective capacity to counterbalance power concentrations. That ongoing tension may feel exhausting, but it also propels us to act. It sustains the desire to explore alternatives to top-down models, and it exists as a spontaneous dimension of human social life. Returning to your question: art has always been political. For much of history, it was deeply entwined with power, an expression of it, even an extension. Today, art often still speaks the language of a dominant class, enclosed in a bubble that is, by its very nature, exclusionary. We need to cultivate practices that move in the opposite direction of power accumulation, toward horizontality. Practices that can generate effects outside the art system, that can make an impact socially, that at least demonstrate the intention to throw a harpoon at verticality and pull it down to earth. Personally, the path I’m pursuing, and which I know I share with many others, is one of art that centers relationships, ecology, territorial research, the socio-political; that thrives on its processes of activation even before the production of aesthetic objects. Art that moves through the web of events and connections we discussed earlier, constantly correlating aesthetics and ethics. And by aesthetics, I don’t mean just “the study of beauty,” but rather, in its original sense, the investigation of human perception in the world. If we can steer the creative process in this direction, then yes, art can genuinely participate in that broader social tension. It can imagine contributing to something larger (as it has in the past, and as it still does in many cases today). That’s why I speak of sound more as a means than an end, because I seek practices where the true value lies in the relational dimension of making, and in the participatory processes that this can involve. The artwork itself, I believe, holds that value I mentioned earlier: a momentary reconfiguration of reality. As such, it holds great potential and can speak volumes. But as with much post-war art, it must also testify to the process, highlighting the ecological and intersectional approaches I described earlier, and not existing merely as a “beautiful object,” let alone as a technical or technological exercise.