From Time I Keep the Spiral

In From Time I Keep the Spiral, Florencia Curci continues her long-term inquiry into sonic inscriptions and the temporalities embedded in matter. The project departs from field recordings and physical traces gathered during previous expeditions across the Andes and the sub-Antarctic archipelagos of South America, extending an ongoing research on “archaeologies by contact.”

During her residency, she will experiment with hand-made phonographic instruments and mechanical readers capable of translating surfaces into sound. Through these devices, she proposes a form of listening understood as a tactile and temporal practice, connecting hand, instrument, and matter, and exploring the circularity of inscription and playback as a way of thinking through sound.

In other stages of her practice, she focused on the historical moment of the invention of the microphone and the loudspeaker in relation to transmission and the real-time extensions of the body. Now she wants to turn towards the phonograph, the possibility of archiving sound, and its impact on cultural imagination. In what ways could the act of resounding these historically charged objects subvert and re-signify phonography, shifting it into a different poetic and political field?

The spiral is the form of the groove in the phonograph and gramophone, of vinyl records, even tapes, inscription technologies that conceive time as recurrence, variation, and rhythms folding back on themselves. It offers a way to think about how sound becomes matter and matter becomes time. She wants to use this form to approach temporality and memory through the materiality of the supports, to think of the territory these objects and recordings come from as a temporal spiral where past, present, and future overlap in motion.

Florencia Curci is a sound artist, researcher, and curator working between experimental radio, sound art, and territorial inquiry. Her practice explores the political and poetic potential of listening and transmission technologies through collective and material-based methodologies. She co-develops Rhythmical Zones with artist Kerstin Ergenzinger, a series of experiments on rhythm as a relational and multiscalar phenomenon, and collaborates in Terra Ignota, a transdisciplinary project engaging art and science in sub-Antarctic territories. Curci founded and directs RADIO CASo (radiocaso.xyz), Argentina’s first radio dedicated to sound art and experimental music, conceived as an open infrastructure for listening and exchange.