Pouring Memory into Memory

At the core of “Drink the Rose, Spit the Dream” is a series of sound installations composed of multiple loudspeakers arranged in a dense sequence within a room bathed in uniform green light. This light suspends visual perception, reducing the visual apparatus and shifting attention from sight to sound, while also suggesting a temporal abstraction: everything is entrusted to listening, and everything remains fluid. Sound occupies and defines the space, transforming it into a perceptual environment in which vision is no longer central. The arrangement of the speakers suggests a trajectory—an acoustic path that does not offer a privileged listening point but instead invites movement by following the sound. Mounted on slender metal stands that reach the height of the visitor, the speakers construct a spatial score that prompts the visitor's body to walk, shift position, pause, and strain to catch sounds emanating from one speaker, and in the next moment from another. The rigorous alignment of the speakers suggests an apparent order, yet the sound remains inevitably uneven, asynchronous, and unstable.

Overlapping voices emerge from the speakers, drawn from different contexts and temporalities: performative readings, backstage recordings, sounds captured in a Japanese temple, as well as a montage generated through artificial intelligence, which translated a series of private conversations into musical notes. According to the artist, these sources were deliberately combined to create a complex sonic layering that highlights both the personal and mediated dimensions of the work. “Versare il mare nel mare” (Pouring the Sea into the Sea) is the title of the series of tracks featured in the installation. The phrase refers to an action without a practical purpose: offering what already exists, a move meant solely to maintain the state of things. In this sense, the act relinquishes any instrumental value and becomes a repeated, almost obstinate gesture that exposes the impossibility of completely severing one’s relationship with the past.

In fact, Palena’s research is first and foremost personal: an attempt to rework the past and to communicate that memories, like identity itself, cannot be fixed once and for all—it evolves each time you think about it. “Pouring the sea into the sea” thus becomes a way of continually recirculating memory, acknowledging that memories cannot be isolated or archived in the past. Pouring memory into memory, one might say: retracing it, coming to terms with it, even if not necessarily in order to heal.

Palena’s dialogue with psychoanalysis, sound therapy, and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) represents a central passage in her trajectory. These are methods of self-exploration that the artist experiments with and channels into her work, not just as therapeutic tools but as conceptual and sensorial frameworks. The words that surface in the audio tracks do not form complete or fully decipherable discourses; rather, they are traces of something that has already occurred and continues to resonate in the present, within a field that is constantly being redefined—traversed by layers, returns, and ruptures. Through sound, Palena renders this condition of unstable permanence perceptible, transforming listening into a space in which the past continues to reverberate in the present.

Central to Palena’s practice is the use of the loop: a repetition that never assumes a hypnotic or calming function but instead operates as a mode through which the past resurfaces incessantly and without resolution. In “Versare il mare nel mare,” sound does not accompany a process of healing nor suggest the overcoming of trauma; on the contrary, it insists on the necessity of continually returning to what has been, as if only through repetition it were possible to grasp its persistence in the present. This temporal insistence does not remain abstract but finds a spatial and corporeal articulation within the installation itself.

Each track in the series is identified by the artist as a Figure, evoking figures in dance and suggesting a direct correspondence between sound and movement. Through this framing, repetition becomes not only a temporal structure but also a physical one, unfolding through the listener’s body in space. Sound thus occupies a decisive role within Palena’s practice: the installations construct an acoustic fabric that guides and orients the public’s physical perception of time and space within the exhibition. Frequencies, melodies, voices, and silences generate a sensorial environment in which the visitor’s experience enters into relation with that of the artist, without ever fully coinciding. Sound takes on a physical dimension, giving shape to a sonic language capable of conveying the complexity of inner experience.