RESOUNDING

Resounding, a performance and multimedia installation by artist Maddalena Iodice, explores the liminal space between sound and language, emotional articulation and meaning. Through word, voice and breath, in exchange with her flute, Maddalena deconstructs the codes of Western logocentrism, reclaiming the voice as a primal language and a site of encounter with the Other.
Resounding unfolds as an intimate monologue, an exploration of the logos suspended between linguistic and cultural hemispheres. Who are we when words become estranged? What arises within the incomprehensible space between ourselves and others? Maddalena Iodice’s work engages with the value of the unarticulated and its emotional epistemology, connecting with broader discourses on the binary structures that oppose mind and body, the rationality of meaning and the intuitive corporeality of the voice.
Resounding seeks to unsettle a conceptual history of the voice that equates speaking with thinking, proposing instead that speaking is fundamentally rooted in feeling.
In this text, Maddalena elaborates on her ideas, diving into the philosophical frameworks that shape her work.

Moving Discourse presents Maddalena's writing on RESOUNDING in the text section, alongside a documentation of the performance in the video section.

“The flute dangerously allows itself to become a vehicle of 
phoné, in the dual sense of the term: voice and sound. Whoever 
plays it renounces articulated speech, evoking a world in which 
the acoustic sphere and expressions of corporeality 
predominate”  – Adriana Cavarero

“Two parties always enter into relation in such a way that both 
emerge transformed” – Andreas Webber

The performance Resounding, 2026, is grounded in the somatic activation of the body through sonic scores and gestural inputs. These open up to movement, shaping a narrative with a syncopated, repetitive, and asynchronous rhythm, wherein the use of the spoken word collapses into sound as the relationality between the mouth and the flute unfolds.

Sensitive to the philosophical framework of New Materialism and contemporary feminist epistemologies, my practice attempts to confront the partiality of the self—constructed, perpetually incomplete, and imperfect—and the relational space with the Other. The event of communication is articulated as a liminal site, a threshold one approaches from a limited, embodied knowledge, situated in lived experience. It is from this condition of partiality that the self opens to confrontation, offering itself to translation, to the loss of the ego: to the encounter with the Other. A loss, yet simultaneously a potential; within the impossibility of absolute objectivity, it  emerges and, concurrently, perishes. An inescapable tension characterizes this relationship, whose motion belongs to the erotic: a generative impulse toward alterity, toward the unknown.

In the performance Resounding, I probe the acoustic possibilities of the flute, exploring its fissures, the way words pushed inside it are returned in a compressed and muffled tone, responding with a shift in corporeal weight to the stifled surge of a note. It is at times a dance, a struggle, a spasm of mouths that seem unable to meet in language. Incommunicability, however, becomes the liberation of the voice from the Aristotelian infrastructure of the logos, and the interpretive key in the work, where, abandoning words, I embrace the intuitiveness of vocal outpourings, clicks, inarticulate laments, and disjointed, uncanny melodies. The acoustic possibilities of the flute seem to precede verbal language, rendering it obsolete, evoking the primal surge of the infant's voice, of animality. Reclaiming the power of female voice against its historical stigmatization —cast as an expression of corporeal irrationality, a disturbing shriek of pleasure and madness, devoid of meaning—Resounding deconstructs the codes of logocentrism. It returns to the voice as a primary language and as a possibility for encounter.

Resounding the body, dancing with the margins of the skin, and improvising with the immediacy of sensation means tapping into the intrinsic knowledge of the body itself, deconstructing the social and cultural internalizations to which we are subjected, and opening up to alternative forms of relation, new contact zones with the Other. This generative impulse also expresses its poetic force within the installation Resounding, (fragments), 2026, where works on canvas, video, and sound distill and expand upon the reflection proposed by the performance. Thin, vibrant layers of pigment thicken on the exhibited canvases; circular forms that read as downward falls, alongside entangled shapes, suggest the rhythm of impulses and movements. The body is inscribed in the gesture.

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Maddalena Iodice is an artist, performer and curator whose practice moves through poetry, somatics and sound-making, investigating the body as a living site of knowledge, a threshold through which histories, desires, and ways of feeling and transform. Her work supports emerging artists through curatorial projects, and comes alive in live performance, where words, breath, and presence converge.

She lives and works between London and Milan, holds a Master’s in Culture, Criticism and Curation from Central Saint Martins, London, and is co-founder of Provinciale11, a collective of artistic and curatorial research which, in dialogue with artists, researchers, and academics, organizes cultural projects and artist residencies. Published in several international journals, her recent writings include interviews and essays with Zehra Doğan, Trisha Brown Company, Marina Abramović, and Liliane Lijn.