Liminaria

Liminaria is a research and field study project, active since 2014, that aims to create sustainable cultural, social and economic networks in several rural areas of southern Italy, particularly in the Fortore area of the Benevento region. Liminaria deploys a series of different (narrative) actions that invest different fields: from cultural and performance events, including a festival and a sound art residency programme, to collaborative pathways with schools and experimentation with hybrid formats linked to new technologies, in a perspective based on the experience of sustainable transition and innovation strategies and practices interacting with local spaces, landscapes and communities. Liminaria stems from Interferenze New Arts Festival, an earlier platform of research and artistic practice, established in 2003 in San Martino Valle Caudina, a rural town in the Partenio mountains, dedicated to exploring the possibilities offered by the arts and technoculture in reconfiguring rural areas as dynamic and active spaces. As with Interferenze, Liminaria is a project which, with decisive awareness, both pertains to and is in itself a ‘network’ or a real dialogue with others within a network of mainly informal yet proactive research. Since 2014, more than thirty artists have taken part in Liminaria’s micro residency and festival programme. The majority, as sound artists, have benefited from the research project’s working methodology predisposed to sound use. The art residency in itself has an intriguing form that requires shifts in thought and approaches to ‘making’ art. In the specific case of sound art residences in rural spaces, the chance to relocate sound art beyond the white cube encourages artists to experience different geographies and spaces. This bi-directional movement back and forth from an urban to a ‘remote’ or peripheral environment produces an artistic practice enhanced by the dialectic of movement and difference. In this respect, the residency format favours slow creative processes, challenging artists to question their social ‘self-representation’ and reconnect with a context far beyond that which feeds their daily practice, allowing them finally to renegotiate terms of artistic production and knowledge through the possibility of new relationships and multicultural debate. Through artistic residencies based on the processes of listening, field recording and sound art, cultural actions and laboratories with schools and communities, workshops, meetings, hybrid formats, Liminaria has experimented over the years with a hybrid form of co-curation with artists, curators and local actors, in close contact with the rural territory and its inhabitants. The 'limen' is the investigative space around which Liminaria's research has been built: understood as a geographical and cultural threshold, as a political boundary, and even more as a topological space that complicates the clear distinctions established by topography and geopolitics, the concept of the limen serves as a critical tool for investigating and at the same time renewing the way we perceive and conceive the 'borders' between an alleged 'centre' and a so-called 'remote or isolated', referring in particular to the rural areas of southern Italy. Liminaria proposed a mode of research based on sound-related artistic practices, that is, the use of sound practices related to art and, more generally, listening practices, as a way of crossing these 'border territories' and questioning the dominant narrative paradigms that insist on the marginality, residuality and inescapable peripherality of rural territories.