Virginia Ryan Visual Artist

Terremotus Femminile is the second installment of an on-going Italy-based project I began in 2007 with 'Intransitu' in Puglia, mapping the female experience through the hand, the eye, and the voice. Each time, I work in collaboration with both the American sound-designer Steven Feld and groups of women who sew, weave, and embroider their stories in response to the particular idea, emotion or event. As an artist, my practise is concerned with memory, identity and territory. Here in Naples, the project concerns the earthquake of 1980, exhibited underground in collaboration with a group of women from the Quartieri Spagnoli who had never worked together before. The resulting elaboration of each woman's "essential tremors," produced over a period of six months in 2008 is ten sewn and embroidered cloths to be exhibited on the 23rd of November, the anniversary of the earthquake, accompanied by both photographic portraits of each participant, complimented by

Feld's sound environment. Both of us wish to thank the members of Sabu - Pietro Tatafiore, Massimiliano Esposito and particularly Giuseppe Ruffo for his curatorship, and the women for their spirited collaboration.

click here for visual documentation

3rd November 2008

Terremotus Femminile Audio CD:

Listen to the past become present: Through the sky and from the earth, an innocent Avellino broadcast is interrupted by the 1980 earthquake, the tremors fragmenting radio waves into static. Meanwhile, here in Quartieri Spagnoli, local women sit in Largo Barrache 28 years later, telling us the stories of their handwork, bringing voice to the authority of their experience. And above us, around us, workers drill, motorists pass, children play, life reverberates and takes its place, pressing new sonic vibrations into the roof and walls of a building whose every brick vibrates with memories of fear and of shelter.

Steven Feld

www.voxlox.net