CESSE Conference / Papers: SEMI SILENT SHOWCASE / 1 Dec 2018
Concert: Listening Session: Semi Silent / Săptămâna Sunetului / 29 Nov 2018 / Három Holló 

Co-founder of the Jumătatea plină association, Artistic Director of the Sâmbăta Sonoră (Sonic Saturday) program and curator of the SEMI SILENT podcast platform, Anamaria Pravicencu organizes concerts of improvised, experimental and contemporary music, performances of sound poetry, listening sessions with sound and radio art, conferences and workshops. For SEMI SILENT, Anamaria Pravicencu works also as a producer for pieces by Romanian artists and her own.

The Jumătatea plină association collaborates with artists and musicians from different countries. Octav Avramescu, also co-founder of Jumătatea plină, created in 2016 the Romanian edition of the Week of Sound (Săptămâna Sunetului), and in 2018, Anamaria Pravicencu opened a program of individual and collective sound art residencies, Sonic Future Residencies, whose productions are presented to the public through the SEMI SILENT podcast platform and public listening sessions. Another interest of Jumătatea plină is the feminine sound and music creation, for which Anamaria Pravicencu created in 2017, within the SEMI SILENT program, a dedicated project called Her Voice. The most prolific artists in the SEMI SILENT portfolio are today women, and their promotion is an artistic and production priority.

Anamaria Pravicencu studied sculpture and sound art at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and in 2001 received a scholarship at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Sound Department, supported by LVMH. Interested in work with space in site specific situations, her artistic practice was initially favoring architectural interventions and sound installation, and through the Sâmbăta Sonoră program and the SEMI SILENT podcast platform, she increasingly presented sound composition and radio art in the recent years.
TALK: Thinking nature through art

In Romania, interest in sound starts and ends with art applications: field recording, sound composition, video, cinema, music or ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicologists have a long tradition of collecting sound in remote areas and, lately, artists have started to go out of the city in search for spectacular captures, but the issue of natural sound’s diminishing quality is not yet a subject they discuss publically. Through the experience of recording in the countryside and in nature these last years, we all discovered that is more and more difficult to capture sounds untouched by modernity. The first reflex when faced with this failure usually concerns criticizing the technology we had at disposal and/or reassessing expectations of capturing the idyllic projection of nature and countryside life. The failure is multiplying and still we avoid a reading of the reality in the new terms. But one can still ask himself or herself if art is not a tool that we can really use in order to raise questions, awareness and reflection on the very evolution of our soundscapes, on what is lost, what is left, what can be saved and what can be built.

LISTENING SESSION: SEMI SILENT SHOWCASE
A short selection of sound pieces produced by the podcast platform SEMI SILENT, representatives for the use of field recording in composition, narratives and creative formats.

http://semisilent.ro/
http://saptamanasunetului.ro/
https://sambatasonora.blogspot.com/

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/334325807363240/

(Photo: Nicu Ilfoveanu)