Even the ocean desires water_2024

Even the Ocean Desires Water is a participatory music performance developed in collaboration with the intergenerational women of Stigliano, Italy. The project investigates diachronic transformations in human-land relationships through the lens of wheat cultivation and seasonal labour migrations, drawing on ethnomusicological analysis of local dialect songs and ethnographic interviews to approach oral tradition as living practice.


Summary_In Stigliano, Italy, wheat with its agricultural practices has long mediated social and ecological life, its cycles structuring labour, language and kinship across generations. Yet mechanisation, socio-economic changes, droughts and shifting climates have reconfigured these relations, rendering traditional knowledge practices sites of both continuity and rupture. Engaging women young and old, the project explores how embodied knowledge of human-land relationships is transmitted, contested, and reimagined though folk songs in local language amid change. Intergenerational workshops facilitated reflexive analysis of dialect songs, tracing their linguistic evolution alongside landscape and social restructuring. Participants reworked melodies, adapting them into new vocal forms using wheat-working tools (sieves, bamboo finger guards) as instruments, transforming traditional knowledge into sonic expression.
The performance unfolded around a large swaying, wheat-filled container, evoking cradle and sieve, centring women’s roles in reproducing community and sustenance.
The work positions participatory performance as an ethnographic method: through collective revoicing, participants co-imagine alternative relations to land amid ecological precarity; oral knowledge is not just preserved but actively renegotiated through performance (Ingold, 2000; Tsing, 2015). Here, songs become a medium through which past, present, and uncertain futures are sonically entangled into a living archive of human-land becoming.
The project situates performance at the intersection of anthropology and art, investigating the capacity of collective musicking to render visible the invisible circuits of ecological and social life. Catalogue forthcoming.

Methodology_ ethnographic interviews; ethnomusicological song analysis; intergenerational music workshops; participatory music performance with agricultural tools as instruments.

References
Carpitella, D., & De Martino, E. (1958). Canti e musiche popolari lucani [Field recordings]. Centro Nazionale di Studi di Musica Popolare, RAI.
De Martino, E. (1961). La terra del rimorso: Contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud. Il Saggiatore.
Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
Feld, S. (1982). Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. University of Pennsylvania Press.




       Excerpt of local lullaby_ethnomusicological recording