In March 2023, Argentine sound artist Luciano Piccilli arrived in Vouzela for a Binaural Nodar residency focused on the migratory dynamics of the rural territories of the Viseu Dão-Lafões region. Out of that stay came “Esto de migrar qué sensación tan desparramada” — roughly, “this business of migrating, what a scattered, spilling-over feeling” — a sound and sculptural piece that would go on to become the backbone of his master’s thesis in Sound Art at UNTREF (Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Argentina). What follows is an adapted, shortened version of that text, illustrated with images from the process and the installation.

A question that comes from far away

Over a decade ago, Piccilli migrated from the border lands of the Argentine coast to Buenos Aires. That experience kept working quietly under the surface until, years later, it became the engine of a series of projects about identity, memory and territory. “How does the affective memory of an absent territory act on a migrant’s perception of their present, current space?”, the artist asks in the introduction to his thesis. It is not a question that gets answered once and for all: rather, it is a thread running through the three interventions that make up the series — in Portugal, in Argentina, and later in Misiones — which we trace here from the first one, born in Vouzela.

Before arriving in Portugal, Piccilli had noticed something ordinary: a bus’s rear-view mirror, vibrating with the idling engine and returning a blurred image, “as if it were a cataract”. That observation — linking sonic vibration to the degradation of an image — became the technical and poetic principle behind the whole project.

Ecos da Ida e do Retorno, in Vouzela

Ecos da Ida e do Retorno is a Binaural Nodar project, part of the 16th cycle of artist residencies in rural areas of the Viseu Dão-Lafões region. The open call invited participating artists to address the migrations shaping these territories: on one hand, the historical exodus of Portuguese people who, faced with extreme social and economic circumstances, left for other continents; on the other, the more recent immigration of people from Angola, São Tomé and Príncipe, Brazil and other countries, who today are reshaping the identity of these rural communities.

During his stay, Piccilli recorded interviews with migrants living in the region, asking them to describe — as if it were a postcard — the landscape they considered most representative of their homeland. “Curiously, most of these accounts kept bringing us back to specific points very close to the sea”, the artist notes.

“O cheiro a mar, a alegria, o amor e a felicidade, acima de tudo.” [The smell of the sea, joy, love and happiness, above all.] — Sónia Couceiro, a migrant woman from Angola, speaking about her homeland

The installation was placed on one of the highest points in the region, the Serra de Nossa Senhora do Castelo, with the mirror facing the border. “The landscapes these migrants described did not belong to the territory where this mirrored device stood immersed. In other words, the distance from the place of origin appears — something like a song to a faraway home”, Piccilli writes.

The mirror that speaks

At the heart of the piece is what Piccilli calls “transduction”: the voices recorded in the interviews are played back against the mirrored panel itself, which functions simultaneously as a reflective surface and a sonic membrane. Piezoelectric microphones pick up the vibration the sound causes in the material and feed it back, in a chain, through recursive recording and playback — a procedure the artist calls “sonic folding”, in direct dialogue with Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1970). The real-time process was developed together with artist Julián Di Pietro, in a Max/MSP programming patch.

The result is an object the artist himself calls “el hablante” — the speaker, the one who speaks — because the mirror no longer just reflects optically: it physically vibrates with the voices passing through it, gradually blurring the image it returns. “There is an idea of transit, a journey of the voices through the membrane, a constant movement of these accounts as they pass from meaning into sound”, Piccilli writes.

“Whoever approaches the membrane, mirrored and trembling, will soon hear a rumor arriving from a distance. And whoever lets themselves be carried by listening, by eyelid-less ears, may half-close their eyes to glimpse a forgetting and, perhaps, will soon find that the rumor never arrives. It was already there.” Marcelo Turdo, psychologist and writer, on encountering the piece at galería Acéfala (2024)

The residency culminated in a public presentation at the Escola Técnica de Vouzela, where students gathered around the device and the voices it returned, transformed.

Memory, voice and territory

Theoretically, Piccilli’s work is in dialogue chiefly with two authors. In Gilles Deleuze, he finds the concept of the “fold” as a way to think about memory: not a linear storage of the past, but a dynamic structure in which past and present continually intertwine, forming layers of meaning — much like physical territories, themselves crossed by social, cultural and political dynamics in permanent transformation. In Paul Ricoeur, he finds the idea of “sites of memory”: spaces that work as reminders against forgetting, while orally transmitted accounts “fly away like words do”.

Voice occupies a central place here. Quoting Mladen Dolar, Piccilli recalls that “the voice is the material support of meaning, and yet, in itself, contributes nothing to it” — it is a vehicle, not the content. In his own words: “Where does a subject come from? Intonation, accent and rhythm tell us about a landscape. What interests me is being able to link these ways in which sound can affect the landscape as a metaphor for a socio-cultural issue: the migration of people generates new territorial identities — so how does this process change the body-voice at the same time as it also changes the notion of territory?”

From the hills of Vouzela to the world

“Esto de migrar qué sensación tan desparramada” was the first of three site-specific interventions that make up the body of work Piccilli presents in his thesis. In August 2023, a second version — this time as a non-site installation, in the sense given to the term by Robert Smithson — was shown in the group exhibition “Dónde, Espacios Transpuestos”, at galería Acéfala in Buenos Aires, curated by Mene Savasta Alsina, as part of a partnership between UNTREF and the gallery. In 2024, a third intervention, “Antes el Monte”, brought the same procedure to Profundidad, in Misiones, near the border between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay — this time gathering testimonies from Mbya-guaraní communities about the deforestation of the Paranaense forest.

“It is not simply about deconstructing the account, but rather about folding and unfolding the voice through the landscape.”Luciano Piccilli

Ultimately, the project asks us to think of memory not as something fixed to be preserved, but as a process in continual folding and unfolding — in which past experiences mix, are reinterpreted, and transform. “The affective memory of the absent territory profoundly influences the way a person perceives their current, present surroundings, constituting a fundamental element in the development and hybridization of new territorial identities”, the artist writes in his thesis’s conclusion. By returning the voices of those who migrated, blurred, the Vouzela mirror became — for an instant — a portal between distant territories.