Radio Version
soundwork, radio version, duration: 2’12”, 2016
Selection of questioning sentences pronounced by Ingrid Bergman dubbed by Lydia Simoneschi’s voice. The questions follow one another without interruption, crushed and compressed by a rhythm that does not allow pauses.
The subtitle “Bald heads with their mother’s voice still in their ears” is taken from the poem “The woman that had more babies than that” by Wallace Stevens
(…) Are old men breathed on by a maternal voice,
Children and old men and philosophers,
Bald heads with their mother’s voice still in their ears.
The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds
And of sounds so far forgotten, like her voice,
That they return unrecognized. The self
Detects the sound of a voice that doubles its own,
In the images of desire, the forms that speak,
The ideas that come to it with a sense of speech.
The old men, the philosophers, are haunted by that
Maternal voice, the explanation at night.
They are more than parts of the universal machine.
Their need in solitude: that is the need,
The desire, for the fiery lullaby.
From: The woman that had more Babies than that by Wallace Stevens