Listening as Narrative

It begins with a cloud of sound.

Avocado. Harpy. 12-08-2025

grating, nymphaeum, leaves and pine needles: deep red 13-08-2025

The woman of a thousand voices talks perfectly loud.

But nobody ever hears the sound of water. 14-08-2025

音の雲から始まる。

アボカド。オウギワシ。12-08-2025

格子、ニンファエウム、葉と松葉：濃い赤 13-08-2025

千の声を持つ女はとても大きな声で話す。

しかし誰も水の音を聞かない。14-08-2025¹

“Not that everything in culture is narrative; but practically everything in culture has a narrative aspect to it.”²

The concept of listening within Ramona Ponzini’s work is not a passive or receptive act but a generative, compositional gesture. Her field recordings never merely document an external reality: they produce encounters, a way of being with the world through sound. Drawing on Mieke Bal’s concept of narratology, one can understand Ponzini’s sound practice as an experiment in narrative agency: the transformation of hearing into telling, where every acoustic fragment carries a relational event. In this sense, Ponzini’s practice performs the tension between story and situation, narration and resonance. Each recording is a form of temporal composition: an acoustic unfolding that activates both environment and listener as participants. The result is not a story about a place but a story told with it.

In this sense, the present essay itself unfolds as a narrative, mirroring the dialogic and atmospheric nature of Ponzini’s sound practice. Through the inclusion of fragments from her recordings and the constellation of poetic notes that accompany them, the text behaves less as a description than as an environment: a resonant field where listening, language, and place become entangled. Drawing on Bal’s notion of narrative as a performative and relational process, I argue that Ponzini’s practice defines field recording as an environmental narrative, one that unfolds through listening rather than representation. Letting the writing itself move through the tonal, relational, and temporal fields created by her installations, sound becomes less a representation of place than a threshold: a zone where vibrations carry traces of landscape, memory, and material presence while also opening toward what the artist describes as a “trans-temporal message.”

In her sound installations 最小単位 (2024) and Never Look at the Sun (Delightful Horrors) (2024), recording emerges as a situated, embodied gesture grounded in specific sites. 最小単位 grows out of the mountain environments of the Valle Vermenagna, where the breaths of the accordion are aligned with the rhythmic “breathing” of ravines, forests, and geological formations. Never Look at the Sun (Delightful Horrors) is shaped through walks to the locations represented on the panoramic frieze of the Museo Nazionale della Montagna in Turin, each recording marking the physical effort and temporal duration to reach those places.
Her sixty-day installation 夏 (2025) at Megadue in Bologna continues this spatial and experiential investigation. Rather than anchoring itself to a single site, it draws from her expanding archive: each day, two tracks are paired and activated in an otherwise empty room, generating an evolving acoustic score. These daily constellations resist linearity, privileging proximity and atmosphere. Their affective dimension emerges not from expressive content but from the conditions of listening itself—the empty room, the shifting pairings, the temporal openness that invites the listener into states of attunement and expectancy.

[back and forth]

In 最小単位 (Saishō tan’i, “Minimum Unit”), the artist situates field recording as a site of negotiation between natural and cultural resonances. By aligning the breaths of the accordion with the emotional sounds of the valley, she constructs an acoustic ecology where instrument and landscape breathe together. The compositional framework, based on the geographic coordinates of specific locations, renders the act of recording as both cartography and correspondence: a mapping that vibrates across human and nonhuman scales. 最小単位 explores the dialogue between mountain landscapes and human culture by blending natural soundscapes with traditional instruments. Starting from the accordion’s bellows as a minimal sonic unit, the artist connects it to the “breaths” of the Orrido delle Barme and the Palanfrè forest. Recordings of instruments, field sounds, and the artist’s voice are combined and structured according to the geographical coordinates of the sites, creating distinct yet interconnected sonic compositions.

Another piece is Promenade (2023), which grew out of a reflection on accessibility and inaccessibility, not only in relation to artworks but also to museum spaces themselves. Hidden or normally inaccessible areas of the Castello di Rivoli – Museo d'Arte Contemporanea—such as the cistern, the Grotta del Ninfeo, the well, and the Sala dei Falconieri—became sites of exploration. By recording these spaces, she recovered sounds that might otherwise remain unheard and made them perceptible to all audiences, including those who cannot rely on sight. The resulting recordings transform inaccessibility into a shared acoustic experience, where sound and vibration act as inclusive, democratic media. The work unfolds in dialogue with two pieces from the collection. In Promenade – Sound Scribbles, Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings Panels and Tower with Colours and Scribbles (1992) are reinterpreted sonically: color sequences guide the structuring of environmental recordings into layered “sonochromies,” offering a translation of visual rhythm into sound. In Promenade – Reverse, Lothar Baumgarten’s Yurupari - Rheinsberg Room (1984) is approached through reversed recordings of the names of tropical plants and animals, combined with the promenade sounds. This creates a subtle journey through time and classification, undoing hierarchical logics while revealing the musicality embedded in the space itself.
This approach resonates deeply with Mieke Bal’s notion of narrativity. For her, narrative does not reside in the structure of events but in the act that connects them, the temporal and affective relation between telling and listening. In Ponzini’s work, this act becomes explicitly acoustic: sound tells not through words but through attunement. Each recording is both a fragment and a gesture, a micro-temporal fold in which listening constitutes the narrative itself. The result is a form of environmental storytelling that bypasses representation: rather than describing the world, it listens with it.

Within this atmospheric frame, recording mediates between what has been and what is still unfolding—between memory and projection, the local and the planetary, the human and the more-than-human. In works such as 最小単位 (Saishō tan’i), Never Look at the Sun (Delightful Horrors), and 夏, Ponzini stages sound as a temporal event of relation, an ongoing negotiation in which presence and absence, material and immaterial forces interlace. Her recordings do not fix a moment; they activate a process of re-listening in which environment, listener, and archive remain in continuous flux. The temporalities that emerge are not linear but spiralic, looping between origin and echo, production and reception, self and other.
This listening-with also implies an ethics of co-presence. In the installations’ spatial arrangements—whether the empty room of 夏, the dispersed topology of Promenade, or the multi-channel layering of 最小単位—the listener is invited to inhabit a position that is never central nor fixed. The sound environment unfolds differently with each body, each step, each breath. Meaning thus arises not from the sound object, but from the relational field it creates. As Brandon LaBelle has argued in his writings on acoustic justice,³ such practices enact forms of reciprocity that exceed representation: they offer spaces in which listening becomes a mode of coexistence, where difference is neither assimilated nor silenced, but resonantly held.
Through this lens, Ponzini’s practice can be read as a meditation on the afterlife of sound—its capacity to outlast its source, to travel across time and matter, to reappear as vibration or memory. Each recording is a trace that resists closure, a residual presence that continues to act. The daily reconfiguration of 夏, for instance, performs the very temporality of afterlife: a perpetual recomposition in which sounds from the past encounter the contingencies of the present. Similarly, the reversed voices of Promenade – Reverse make audible the persistence of history within the now—a sound that refuses to fade.Her sound practice proposes a form of storytelling that unfolds through vibration, relation, and time. It calls for an attuned listening that is at once aesthetic and ethical, attentive and open-ended.

She is matter that throbs.

Bodies of flesh, branches of the forest.

She pushes breath beyond the skin,

makes the ground tremble where the sacred hides. 24-08-2025

彼女は脈打つ物質。

肉の身体、森の枝。

皮膚の向こうへ息を押し出し、

聖なるものが隠れる大地を震わせる。24-08-2025⁴

[back and forth]

The work Never Look at the Sun (Delightful Horrors) unfolds as a living, evolving sound sculpture: a collage composed of fragments collected during the artist’s walks to the sites depicted on the panoramic terrace frieze of the Museo Nazionale della Montagna in Turin. Each recording is the trace of a physical journey, undertaken on foot or through environmentally conscious means, where movement itself becomes part of the composition. Rather than offering a purely documentary account, the piece questions our tendency to idealize the sonic image of distant and “natural” places. What emerges instead is an awareness of the human presence that inhabits, shapes, and resonates within these environments. Listening becomes a form of encounter not with untouched nature, but with its continuous negotiation between the natural and the cultural, the experienced and the imagined. The project also reinterprets the panoramic gaze traditionally associated with the mountain museum. By replacing vision with listening, the work turns the act of surveying the landscape into something slower, more porous, and deeply embodied. Listening suspends the panoramic impulse to dominate a view; instead, it draws the visitor into the landscape’s own tempo, where perception unfolds breath by breath, step by step. In this acoustic mode, the mountain no longer appears as an object to be contemplated from afar but as a presence encountered through vulnerability and reciprocity. This reminds us that exploration is never instantaneous or weightless—it is shaped by effort, by the risks of not knowing, and by the humility of approaching a place without claiming it. In this sense, the work dialogues with the museum’s historical narratives of ascents and expeditions, revealing exploration not as conquest but as a practice of attention and acceptance. The title borrows its words from the warning engraved on the terrace binoculars, while the notion of “delightful horrors” evokes the nineteenth-century bourgeois discovery of the Alps, a mix of fascination, awe, and fear toward the sublime. Completing the composition, a “ghost track” introduces an absence: the iconic Villa Scott in Turin, immortalized by Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (1975). This phantom insertion connects the mountain’s imaginary to the city’s cinematic memory, extending the soundscape beyond its geographic frame and into the realm of cultural myth. Through Never Look at the Sun (Delightful Horrors), Ramona Ponzini reconfigures the act of field recording as both a method of inquiry and a form of relational storytelling. Her work does not merely document sonic environments but stages a dialogue between the human body and its surrounding landscape. Each recorded fragment carries the trace of movement, breath, and distance, transforming listening into a form of embodied cartography. The piece situates itself between ethnography and fiction, between the archival and the ephemeral, inviting a reconsideration of what it means to ‘reach’ a place—whether geographically, historically, or emotionally. By transposing the panoramic gaze into an aural experience, Ponzini displaces the viewer’s position of mastery, proposing instead a situated and vulnerable mode of perception. In doing so, it resonates with broader ecological and feminist sensibilities, where knowing is inseparable from listening, and listening becomes a shared terrain of reciprocity and care.

Bal’s definition of fabula as “the result of the mental activity of reading… a memory trace that remains after the reading is completed”⁵ becomes especially productive when “reading” is understood as listening, and “text” as sound itself. Ponzini’s recordings do not present the listener with an external narrative to decode; rather, they produce the conditions for this fabula to emerge. Each sonic event becomes the place where environment, body, and attention connect and negotiate meaning. Listening is thus not reception but co-creation—a relational unfolding that mirrors the dialogic structure of her work. Ponzini’s work, in fact, operates through what Gernot Böhme defines as "atmospheres"⁶—affective spaces that arise between subjects and their surroundings, where perception is not a matter of detached observation but of immersion and co-presence. Her compositions do not represent environments; they emanate them, allowing the listener to dwell within their tonal qualities and temporal flows.
Thus, rather than offering a linear reading, this essay performs one: it listens alongside the works, tracing their shifting climates and textures, and revealing an underlying narrative that breathes through sound. In doing so, it partakes in what Bal calls the “narrative aspect” of culture—an unfolding story that is not told from the outside but emerges from within the very act of listening and attunement.

Sound extracts

0.00 – 1.28 最小単位 (2024)
1.29 – 2.02 Promenade – Sound Scribbles (2023)*
2.03 – 2.36 Promenade – Reverse (2023)*
2.37 – 4.58 Never Look At The Sun, Delightful Horrors (2024)

*Promenade is part of the digital collection of the Castello di Rivoli – Museo d'Arte Contemporanea.