PROJECTS / CADENCE SAN VITTORINO

Cadence San Vittorino is an ongoing audio-visual project that explores time-based media’s capacity to document ecological change and create an emotionally resonant form of environmental data.

The piece responds to an emergent theme in my recent work: how film and other artistic time-based practices often unintentionally record ecological changes that would be difficult to capture otherwise. These recordings become a unique form of environmental data that can contribute to long-term ecological research. I’m intrigued by how this work could function as “data” over a long duration; its strong emotional connection to creators and viewers may make it surprisingly more resilient than traditional scientific data.

My primary inspiration was therefore a curiosity about film’s ability to act as an unwitting scientific archive, and a recognition that its emotional and cultural resonance may strengthen its chances for long-term preservation.

I began this piece during my 2021 Rome Prize fellowship as a direct engagement with Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 film Nostalghia. I was inspired by Tarkovsky’s use of Italian architecture and landscapes to create spaces of ritual for his protagonists—most notably a scene within the Chiesa San Vittorino.

Cadence San Vittorino is the first in a series of bi-annual pilgrimages to that Chiesa that I plan to make over my lifetime. Structurally, the project embraces pilgrimage and repetition as compositional techniques. These approaches are common to both religious practices and scientific methods—from ritualized spiritual journeys to repeated scientific observations. In this project, I use them as artistic research strategies. I have already documented the church three times over the last four years, and have captured its state in spring, summer, and autumn. Each trip results in a new audio-visual piece. These are meant to be experienced as stand-alone immersive works that also contribute to an evolving document of the environment inside the church.

During each visit, I make audio field recordings and shoot video within the church— from nautical twilight until dawn. I am guided by intuition and an affective connection to specific ecological details: variations in the vegetal life and the flowing water within the nave. Only after a piece is edited and completed, do I then analyze its environmental “data” more soberly, conducting plant identification and other observations.

The very concept of “Cadence” unifies three timescales at work in the project. (1) It addresses the temporal rhythms of ecological succession, embodied by both seasonal cycles and the disrupted patterns imposed by climate change; shifting species ranges and altered blooming periods will increasingly be evident in the films. (2) The idea of cadence also echoes in my pilgrimages to the site. These connect to the deeper time of human repetition layered in this very specific location—from pagan seasonal rituals to early Christian venerations. And musically, (3) the term cadence conventionally describes harmonic progressions that bring a phrase to a predictable sense of resolution. I challenge this last definition through the project’s sound design. In addition to the field recordings, the piece incorporates a subtle, timbre-focused music composition. While each harmonic change flows tonally and logically from the previous one, the composition intentionally avoids harmonic resolution, always remaining open-ended. This mirrors the ongoing and unresolved cadence of ecological change.

Cadence San Vittorino responds to contemporary anxieties about environmental instability. It frames the church’s ongoing ecological transformations as a form of secular, environmental theology. It connects old and contemporary ideas of The Sacred, by locating it as immanent within nature’s cycles—seasonal, generational, and ecological. While traditional religious frameworks struggle to address our current ecological crisis, this project implies a new, nature-focused spiritual paradigm. It responds to human relationships with the environment and entangles them with both artistic and scientific research.

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