Writing about a performance after it has taken place means questioning the time of its absence. It is an inevitably posthumous gesture, which does not aim to restore what has been seen or heard, but to understand what remains, what continues to stir beneath the surface.
Speaking Cables [EXPANDED] by Agnese Banti, presented at the Romaeuropa Festival 2025, is one of those works that survive their own temporality, continuing to resonate even when the stage has been dismantled and the sound has faded away. What remains is not a clear memory, but a suspended vibration, an echo that still inhabits the body of those who listened.
Entering the space meant crossing a constellation of cables, loudspeakers and microphones: a topography of sound lines that, rather than drawing a stage, traced a sensory map. The performer’s voice, fragmented and recombined, ran through the cables like an electric current, generating a constantly changing acoustic environment. There was no privileged point of view, nor a stage front from which to observe: one was immersed in a network of connections, inside an organism of sound and tension. Banti’s body danced with technology, moved by a desire to inhabit it, to merge with it.
The voice became plastic matter, a presence that crossed and was crossed, a hybrid substance capable of touching the boundary between human and artificial. With the passage of time, it is precisely this image that re-emerges with force: the voice that detaches itself from the body, that distributes itself in space and objects, until it loses the boundaries of its origin.
In Agnese Banti’s work, the human voice is the subject of autonomous, radical, ancestral, sensory research. It is body and energy together, vibration and language, memory and contact. Banti investigates the voice as a threshold between presence and disappearance, between identity and otherness, as a place where the human encounters its acoustic double and lets it speak. For her, the voice is a porous territory where the categories of natural and artificial mix: it can break down, multiply, distort itself until it becomes something else, inhuman, collective. It is a form of embodied thought, a field of resonance where perception expands and subjectivity disperses. This radical exploration of the vocal, as gesture, matter, breath, runs through Banti’s entire poetics.
In Speaking Cables, the voice belongs to a community of devices, to a sound ecosystem in which subjectivities continually dissolve and recompose themselves. Reimagined in the mutable and suspended time of memory, the performance appears as an experiment in radical listening, a circular temporality made up of returns and reverberations. In this sense, Speaking Cables [EXPANDED] is a work that focuses on residue and duration, on the possibility that the artistic experience does not end with its representation, but continues to generate vibrations, impulses and perceptions that are free to move and reproduce themselves.
Among the most significant features of the project is Agnese Banti’s deep attention to the community of visually impaired and blind people, which finds an effective dimension in the [EXPANDED] version. The performance was conceived as a truly accessible experience: through tactile maps, guided tours and a dramaturgy designed for contact rather than vision. Accessibility is not an additional device, but a deeply necessary tool for the dissemination of sound and its performative dimension among all the bodies that experience it, horizontally, without barriers. Banti transforms the very idea of enjoyment, proposing an art that does not exclude, that reconfigures the relationship between spectator, space and sound. Listening becomes a multisensory experience, a meeting ground between different bodies, a place where perception is shared and shaped.
This attention to care and sensory proximity runs through the artist’s entire poetics. Every sound gesture in Speaking Cables is a form of relationship: between voice and matter, between performer and spectator, between device and space. It is a work that rejects the idea of technology as a neutral surface, instead restoring a living, relational, affective dimension to it.
The cables are not instruments, but intermediate bodies, true mediums; the loudspeakers are not objects, but presences that breathe together with the voice. Everything is interconnected, traversed by invisible currents, by waves that continuously construct and disintegrate space. It is a work that lives in the time of resonance, on the margin between presence and disappearance. In its dissolution, the performance affirms the possibility of persistence: that of sound that survives, of the voice that continues to speak through its absences. In a performative landscape often dominated by image and visibility, Agnese Banti’s work brings attention back to listening, to the invisible physicality of sound, to a form of perception that is also a political act. Viewed from this distance, her practice appears as an invitation to slow down, to tune one’s hearing to the tempo of memory, to let the voice, in the cables, continue to vibrate within the listener.
Agnese Banti. Speaking Cables [EXPANDED], Rome, Romaeuropa Festival 2025, 10-11.10.2025
By and with: Agnese Banti | Live electronics: Andrea Trona | Visual and sound design, direction, dramaturgy, music: Agnese Banti | Artistic collaboration, music informatics, technical direction: Andrea Trona | Collaboration on dramaturgy, direction and staging: Marta Vitalini | Technical and lighting consultancy: Antonio Rinaldi | Lighting technician: Andrea Gallo | Artistic encounters curated by: FONDO Yan Duyvendak, Camille Louis, Ana Pi | Accessibility in collaboration with: Giuseppe Comuniello, Dalila D’Amico, Camilla Guarino
Production credits: Project supported by: FONDO, network for emerging creativity (first edition, coordinated by Santarcangelo dei Teatri and produced with AMAT, Centrale Fies, ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, Fabbrica Europa, I Teatri di Reggio Emilia, L’arboreto – Teatro Dimora | Emilia Romagna Residency Centre, Operaestate Festival Veneto / CSC Centro per la Scena Contemporanea, Ravenna Teatro, Teatro Pubblico Campano, Teatro Pubblico Pugliese, TSU Teatro Stabile dell’Umbria, Triennale Milano Teatro), ORBITA|Spellbound Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza as part of Creazioni accessibili 2024 and Romaeuropa Festival. With the support of: LAMINARIE as part of the 2025 creative residencies – DOM la cupola del Pilastro and Grabinski Point. Thanks to the Francesco Cavazza Institute for the Blind, Braille Printing House of the Region of Tuscany.
images: (cover 1): Agnese Banti, “Speaking Cables”, Romaeuropa Festival 2025, photo: Monia Pavoni (2) Agnese Banti, “Speaking Cables”, Romaeuropa Festival 2025, photo: Lorenza Daverio (3) Agnese Banti, “Speaking Cables”, Romaeuropa Festival 2025, photo: Laura Farneti (4-5) Agnese Banti, “Speaking Cables”, Romaeuropa Festival 2025, photo: Lorenza Daverio
