Alessandro D’Emilia

David Monacchi, a hi-tech explorer, knows the Amazonian forest well, but his means of exploration are unusual. A sound artist, “field recorder”, and eco-acoustic composer, he understands terrain through sound. For the sound landscape of this region is as rich as the diversity of wildlife that produces it. Today, global warming and humans are threatening species, and sound pollution itself is involved in the extinction of some of these; nature being well constructed, the sound spectrum of the forest is based on a subtle balance, in which each species communicates on a very specific frequency, never interfering with the others. The upheaval caused by man, through the installation of a pipeline for example, upsets this balance.

A smaller scale Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées can be found just outside Shanghai; a copy of St. Peter’s in Rome can be found in Yamoussoukro, in the Ivory Coast: a journey over three continents to see the architecture of imitation, the uncanny world of the fake.