Ipogeo Bacile – Underground Sound Theatre in Spongano, Salento
THE IPOGEO BACILE – SILENCE AS ORIGIN
Dating from the 1600s, the Ipogeo Bacile is a natural sounding board built from earth, stone and rock. A place where silence guards the memory of a past life and seems still to breathe through its walls.
Since 2018, thanks to the generosity of the owners, I have been able to live in this magical space, where The Sound Garden has found its highest expression.
It is here that I understood how necessary it is to step away from the noise of the world and to seek ideal spaces, distant silences, places able to give sound back its freedom.
From this experience comes the vision of building new spaces dedicated to listening: environments acoustically isolated from outside chaos, clean and healthy, where the soundscape can be designed with awareness. Musical oases, places for a possible rebirth of the musical experience.
Silence is the first musical element to introduce.
It is the point of departure and of arrival, the original condition from which to build new euphonic identities. A vision already expressed more than forty years ago in the manifesto of The Sound Garden.
It is from the silence of the Ipogeo that I draw inspiration to create sounds and soundscapes. In silence I found the infinite: it opened the doors to unknown sonic worlds, guiding me towards the essence. Here sound seems to be born from silence and from the walls themselves, to surface from matter, cross the space and soar freely in its reverberations.
Sound as invisible matter.
“As an expert nachiro (helmsman), navigating the sound waves, Giovanni Corvaglia clears away all the noise that we usually endure as unaware listeners. He offers us an active perspective on the perception of sounds, which stir molecules and sensations, liquid atoms and tears, in a dive into our bodily and sensory realm, from those temple-places of wonder and acoustics that he chooses with painstaking receptivity, almost as if they were a menhir. An idea of sound that is circular and possible.” In memory of Luigi Leone, these words of his dedicated to me.
SILENCES, SOUNDS AND VISIONS
Silenzi, Suoni e Visioni (Silences, Sounds and Visions) is the title of the sound work that lives permanently in the underground space.
The combination of these three elements generates a Suspended Time, a dimension that crosses Past, Present and Future. The vision is guided by the sonic brushstrokes that animate the space, making it dynamic, shifting and evocative.
The rhythm slows, measured time dissolves and perception is transformed. Here silence answers to other laws.
Sound closes the circle and opens the mind.
A dimension outside time and far from the chaotic everyday world. A space in which to purify listening, regain balance through a few essential elements, and be enveloped by Silence, a silence full of life, in which to find peace and find yourself again.
