Even the ocean desires water is a participatory music performance developed in collaboration with intergenerational women of Stigliano, Italy. It 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 specific agricultural practices, has long mediated the social, political and ecological life of the population, its cycles structuring labour, language and kinship across generations. Yet mechanisation, socio-economic changes, droughts and shifting climates are reconfiguring these relations, rendering traditional
knowledge practices sites of both continuity and rupture.
Engaging women of different age groups, the project explores how embodied knowledge of human-land relationships is transmitted, contested, and reimagined through folk songs
in local language amid such changes. 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 (wooden and metal sieves, bamboo finger guards, wheat grains) 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.
This 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.