With the opening of the third chapter of the exhibition format Gli anni, the Madre Museum launches the public program accompanying the exhibition with a conversation between artist Hira Nabi, curator Carolin Köchling, and Marta Federici from the museum curatorial team.
Soundshapes is a moving series of sound works, curated by Carolin Köchling e Julia Grosse, installed across the entrances and in-between spaces of art institutions. Drawing on the potential of porosity, the project thrives to destabilize the divide between inside and outside, pushing the architecture into a resonating body. For Soundshapes Volume II, Hira Nabi developed a site responsive sound piece to be installed at the entrance of Madre Museum.
The immateriality of sound allows it to travel across material borders, while it depends on the materiality of a surface at the same time. As the artist Pallavi Paul states, The physical properties of sound are more worldly than light. Light can travel in a vacuum, sound cannot. It clings to objects, it clings to people, it clings to things. Responding to the specific circumstances of each hosting institution, the series tests how sound can shape space without altering it physically.
becoming volcanic: cracking, erupting, sleeping, singing (2026) is a sonic offering to Campi Flegrei. The 13-km-wide caldera encompasses parts of Naples from where it extends to the Gulf of Pozzuoli. Episodes of the ongoing eruptions within this large volcanic crater have occurred since Roman times, dating back to 47,000 years BP.
Despite the impossibility of soothing the activities of a volcano through song, the work urges us to face and engage with the unrest of the world. The ascending and descending note patterns of carefully selected ragas from Hindustani classical music, evoke calming effects, while the Italian and Pakistani protest songs demand action against the violence that continues to shake societies and the earth across the globe. Nabi’s offering to Campi Flegrei bounces between futility and necessity, as well as the volcano’s opposing movements of attraction and release.
In their conversation, Hira Nabi, Carolin Köchling and Marta Federici speak about the evolution of becoming volcanic: cracking, erupting, sleeping, singing (2026) for Soundshapes Volume II, within the context of the artist’s wider practice and within the framework of the exhibition series Gli anni.