Paysage intime. A fable to Etel Adnan

Paysage intime. A Fable to Etel Adnan is a sound installation conceived during the artist residency held in June 2025 at the Carlo Zauli Museum. The work emerged from a reflection on the dialogue established with Carlo Zauli’s artistic research and on the relationship he cultivated with the landscape. In his later production, this relationship assumed a central role: his fascination with mountain formations, peaks, and their continuous transformation gradually opened a tension toward the vertical, toward what escapes and changes. The reading of Voyage au Mont Tamalpais by Etel Adnan accompanied this process in an associative and intuitive way. Questions addressed to the author, fragments of an imagined and contemplative dialogue, accumulated throughout the artist’s journal. In Adnan’s text, the mountain appears as a living presence – mother, figure, spiritual entity – and the narrative becomes the concrete space in which these dimensions coexist: an intermediate realm of writing and poetry. The attempt to impose order and direction on meaning remains, however, provisional—a temporary landing place from which one must depart in order to continue the search, and above all the search for the self. The voice in the sound installation is that of the artist reading excerpts from her journal while contemplating the landscape of the Emilian hills. Interwoven with it is the voice of nature itself, echoing the existential questions evoked in the text.