Artist: Carmela De Falco

What remains of a territory once the signs that organised it begin to drift?
A bell still resembles a bell.
A public square still resembles a public square.
A song remains recognisable long after the conditions that produced it have disappeared.
The signs remain.
Their guarantees do not.

Listening with Eyes, Watching with Ears unfolds among such residual forms. Throughout the exhibition, Carmela De Falco returns to objects whose functions appear intact while their operations have become uncertain. Bells, eyelids, knots, traces and refrains persist, yet no longer secure the worlds they once organised.

In signal, a chain of Roman tintinnabula hangs silently in the gallery. For centuries, bells have marked passages, arrivals and presences. Their muteness does not negate their communicative function. It exposes it. Detached from the event they once announced, the bells appear less as instruments than as evidence.

The exhibition repeatedly returns to traces.
A meteorite leaves a furrow.
A shoelace produces a knot.
A phrase acquires a life of its own through repetition.
None of these forms represents an event. Each persists as the material residue of one.

In looking, a pair of closed eyelids interrupts another familiar operation. Cast from the artist’s mother’s eyes, the work introduces a hesitation into vision itself. The eye remains present. Yet it no longer guarantees anything.

In singing for the square, a singer repeatedly performs a fragment from The Beatles’ I Me Mine.

The phrase passes through the square again and again.
Nothing changes.
Then something changes.

Repetition gradually loosens the phrase from the song it once belonged to. It ceases to function entirely as a lyric. What emerges instead is a rhythm that begins to organise attention around itself.The works gathered in Listening with Eyes, Watching with Ears are not concerned with communication so much as with its aftermath. They begin where certainty ends: in the interval between a signal and its destination, a gesture and its repetition, a sign and the world it once helped hold together.

The bell remains a bell.
The eye remains an eye.
The knot remains a knot.
The song remains a song.
Yet something in their operation has shifted.

Text by Maria Valeria Biondo