Jana Astanov interviews Claudia Ferretti.
Featured photo Claudia Ferretti.
CREATRIX Magazine: What made you become a sound artist? Could you share with us how your background influenced your work?
Claudia Ferretti: Everything started with my voice and my love for music and singing. Our voice is the deepest and more intimate sound we have. We live with it and it has resonance in our body and soul. I started studying the voice and its natural sound, so I fell in love with sound in all its forms.
I’m a sensorialist too, I study the phenomenon of perception through sensory analysis science. This pushed me to explore new ways of expression: I explore soundscapes to describe the world through sound.
CXM: What are some of your biggest influences, early and current?
CF: I have a lot of different influences. I’m really curious. I love American songwriters like Nick Cave, Neil Young, Joan As Police Woman and Feist and you can hear it in my songwriting project called Claudia Is On The Sofa.
The great revelation and my first love for my vocal sound research has been Lichens (Robert Aiki). I love the way he uses the voice, you can hear the different shapes of the voice in his music. The way he uses loopers and mixes voices and the sounds of nature and modular synthesizers is impressive.
Another enlightening art work has been Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989) by Hildegard Westerkamp. For me it represents the magic of sound storytelling.
This work showed me how sound itself can create deep emotional tails. So I started exploring soundscapes and recording sounds around me. I started doing soundwalks with people to let them meet and recognize the beauty of the world by hearing it.
Sound can talk about actuality, and can talk about nature too. In the same way, nature talks through sound. A great example of this is David Monacchi. He studies rainforest ecosystems, recording their sounds and pays attention to nature sounds that are disappearing.
CXM: Can you talk a bit about your process in regards to creating sound art.
CF: I love to play with my creativity by giving myself some rules or attitude. Making creative boundaries helps me to focus my attention and gives me a clear idea of what I want to communicate and how. And sometimes I discover really unexpected paths!
I love to go outside in the world and to record sounds and soundscapes I meet. Sometimes I don’t use them in my art, but they give me a lot of inspiration. When you are recording a really thin water drop sound, a sound that suddenly appears could ruin your soundtrack or could make it even more interesting and beautiful. You need to let surprise you and to discern what’s interesting and what is not. It’s great training for music composition too.
CXM: What are some of your notable past projects?
The first important art work I created is Blue Look: a series of sound paintings created with the painter Angelo Bordiga exhibited at ArtMoore House in London.
Paintings and music were created together with one specific project. Angelo and I worked closely to make music and painting techniques talk to each other in a common language, connecting color and timbre, figure and melody, the ways in which materials meet each other and the way in which musical patterns meet each other. I recorded Angelo painting sounds and I put them inside the music. It has been an immersive experience.
Another one was Oomm with Stefano Ogliari Badessi and Alessandro Pedretti: a big silk Buddha head where you could go in and hear music, sounds and smell aromas.
The sound art work I connect with more deeply is called Point Of No Return. It has been a real revelation. Here I explore a really important theme for: climate change.
Point Of No Return is a sound art work created in 2019, before the pandemic showed us more clearly the effects of human activities on the ecosystem. It is a journey through concrete sounds that unravel from today, the point of no-return for climate change, and move backwards to the origin of man and universe. It is a journey from the outside world to the inner self and to the origin of life itself. By using psychoacoustics sounds seem to follow a narrative path. In reality, everything exists from the beginning. If we slowly subtract the concrete sounds of everyday life one by one, we are left with what John Cage heard in the anechoic chamber: the low sound of the blood system and the high sound of the nervous system. Ourselves, nature.
The first time a performed it people came to me and said: “I’ve never thought about this theme in this way”. I didn’t give an answer, but another way to think about the theme of climate change. Art can create brand new worlds in the imagination and in reality too. Transformation starts from silence, from listening. We can listen to the world to make it a better place.
CXM: How did the pandemic impact the way you make art?
This year has been a strange year, nature told us more clearly what’s going on and we all have been called to have a deep look inside ourselves.
I feel that now more than ever my art needs to communicate with people and allow them space to think. I feel the need to send a clear message about protecting our future and our intimate soul. The world around us has changed, the experiences we can have, the people we can meet has changed and so has our intimate world, our feelings and perceptions.
I am deeply convinced that a more conscious attention towards perception increases the possibility of meeting the beauty of the world, thus recognizing it, spreading it and protecting it.
CXM: What’s next for Claudia Ferretti?
I want to keep on singing songs that talk about what’s usually not being said within Italian culture. Italian national identity is extremely gender based, and consequently damaging to us identifying as female.
I also love to collaborate with artists and musicians, bringing different perspectives and ideas that make my art grow and make me feel alive. This year I’ve collaborated a lot in the physical world and from a distance.
A friend of mine said to me: “The goodness of the years is made by the qualities of the people and by the choices we allow ourselves to make beyond the paradigm that surrounds us”.
Next Claudia Ferretti Isonde wants to keep going, keep choosing, not worrying about what will happen, taking whatever happens as it happens.
About Claudia Ferretti Isonde
I am Claudia Ferretti Isonde, musician, sensorialist, soundartist and songwriter – Claudia Is On The Sofa.
I explore sound and soundscapes creating sound art works, for example Point Of No Return (NY), and producing ambient music and soundscapes for visual artists – for example sound paintings with Angelo Bordiga (London), ambient music for Ooomm installation by Stefano Ogliari Badessi (Milan and Lisbon), and sculptures by Michele Liparesi.
I produce soundtracks for documentary movies, perform site specific contemporary music for museums, exhibitions and theaters in Italy, and for international productions.
I explore sound and I study it in all its forms: as music, as a physical and psychological phenomenon, as a form of art and narration. I teach Sensory Analysis (Master Food Identity dell’Università Cattolica di Piacenza) and sound storytelling (Università di Pavia – Facoltà di Filosofia e Teoria dei Linguaggi).
Portfolio: https://spark.adobe.com/video/etEnxknhFmjvk
Bandcamp: https://claudiaferretti.bandcamp.com/
YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UC1NwaP5jGen9oIcnRaQQAfQ
Follow Claudia on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isonde/?hl=it
