This immersive sculptural sound installation consists of over 400 archival audiophonic objects from the 1940s to the 1980s, including vinyl records, cassette players, radios and tape-to-tape players.
The installation is inspired by seismographs in that it detects and accumulates sounds from our environment, and includes live atmospheric sounds recorded from the Giardini. These feed into a multilayered composition that combines clips from reworked film scores, recordings of political speeches, audio archives of historical and social events, dub effects and instrumental and popular music.
Cantos III is intended as a space of reflection that explores themes of memory and erasure through a mosaic of echoes and reverberations, sampled sources pool from prominent cultural figures, including: Mary Frances Berry, Stokely Carmichael, Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, Bob Moses, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Patrice Lumumba, Nelson Mandela and W.E.B. Du Bois.