LINA

Visual pathway made in woodcut with music and sound performances.
Project by Umberto Giovannini

The project’s soundscape (LINA-soundscape) was built in the studio, and had as its starting point a willingness to listen to the surrounding world: a fragmented perception enriched by melodic traces of popular themes from the Twenties over an electronic sound flow. Live recording and mixing: SP Studio, Rimini, December 2018. Stefano Pagliarani: guitar, electronics, arrangements. Umberto Giovannini: diatonic accordion.

LINA project was born from the discovery of a series of audio recordings of Lina, a woman born in 1915 in a rural area of Romagna. Sent to work as a maid at the age of eleven with a noble Roman-Catanese family, she lived with them until her seventeenth birthday, following them in their residences in Rome, Monte Porzio, Catania, Randazzo and Milan. What did the eyes of a child see, raised in a rural world at the beginning of the twentieth century and transported to a radically different environment? What is the meaning of the concepts of time, space and community when faced with different cultural sensibilities? Through a series of images, which take shape from the xylographic media, I am investigating the perception of the contemporary, reread through the bleary lens of a memory that belongs to me only as indirect knowledge. These works are intended to be investigations of a narrated world. You can find the iconography of LINA on umbertogiovannini.it