Sonia Boyce engages with the artist and sound theorist Brandon LaBelle, who guides us through the artist’s poetics, considering sound as a form of radical inclusion, a medium capable of generating interaction, narratives and new understanding.
Sound and listening construct processes that challenge human individuality and conventional languages. Sound, by its porous nature, and the cultural and symbolic manifestation of music fostering social connections, exert an influence on everyone’s capacity to participate.
Sonia Boyce’s project for Palazzo della Ragione saw her collaborate with three students from the “Gaetano Donizetti” Higher Institute of Musical Studies in Bergamo, who were invited to perform and improvise popular songs in the heart of Bergamo’s “Città Alta.” The act of singing from balconies is an explicit reference to the lockdowns, during which people sang songs from inside their homes to support each other in what was a time of crisis. These actions inspired the artist, for whom singing itself represents a gesture of altruism and empathy.

About Sonia Boyce

Sonia Boyce (born 1962, London, where she lives and works) came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning British Black Art scene—becoming one of the youngest artists of her generation to have her work purchased by the Tate Gallery, with paintings that spoke about racial identity and gender in Britain.
Curator Okwui Enwezor invited Sonia Boyce as one of the artists for the 56th Venice Biennale, where she presented Exquisite Cacophony (2015).

About Brandon Labelle

Brandon LaBelle is a musician, artist, writer, theorist, curator, educator and editor based in Berlin. His work, based on performance, sound installation, recording and use of found sounds, focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and para-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (2014-16), Overheard and Interrupted (2016), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Surface Tension (1998-2002).

Bilingual: english / italian. This is a small but sweet little book (11 x 17,7 cm), 96 pages, softcover, published in 2024