Alessia Anastassopulos // Audiovisual Composer

Artist residency in motherhood is a wonderful project by Lenka Cleyton (artistresidencyinmotherhood.com), a way for many creative mothers to restart a creative practice after starting motherhood. I started my residency in October 19, 2023 and worked with my baby Felipe Andrès in many different ways, going with him for sound walks, improvising sessions and creating scores with and him. This has brought to the production of two self-published fanzines, the Vir-Box piece that was commissioned by Maria Sappho, and finally to the Walk With Me sound installation commissioned by The University Of Huddersfield, which will be exhibited in the Holmfirth library in November 2024.

These works have constituted the portfolio of my PhD studies at the University of Huddersfield. My research investigated our sound awareness and our approach to listening to our everyday concrete environment for the creation of audiovisual compositions. In my research I introduce my contribution to research with the original concept of Inclusive listening. Inclusive listening is a creative sound awareness technique that takes into consideration our present and imagined audiovisual environment. Audiovisual sonic fiction is the term I have introduced to identify a genre in which to collocate my works: a narrative fiction that is rendered through objects and their sounds. Refer to “writings” to read more about my research.

Saad is a child who tells about his life under Daesh, and how he ended up in the hospital wounded by an explosive device.

His voice - taken from Davide Preti's video A child in Mosul (Emergency production) - instantly struck me with his tender musicality.

With this audiovisual composition, I wanted to help Saad spread his voice.

Dialogues is an audiovisual composition consisting of a series of six short films that address the topic of communication from different perspectives and with different manufacturing techniques, showing six flashes of absurd but common situations.

In all the works of the series, we find an obstacle element that interferes with communication and which becomes a source of an impediment to serenity.

Dialogues, however, does not want to reach the conclusion of an impossibility of communication but rather wants to become aware of feelings, emotions, and sometimes difficulties that are part of our humanity and which contribute to enriching us and making us feel alive.

Visione Notturna is a series of shows that combine cinema, theater and academic seminar in an original experiment in scientific communication. Silent Moon is a show in the series, dedicated to our satellite: the science of the moon, past, present and future lunar missions, the moon in the popular imagination and in the cinematic one, all told in a mix of languages that reveals surprising correspondences between cinema, theater and science. The project, which manages to unite such different languages and worlds, was created thanks to a collaboration between INAF Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, Astronomical Association, Friends of Arcetri and OpenLab-University of Florence, together with the National Museum of Cinema and the Teatro del Mantice. The original soundtracks of the short films used in the show have been composed by Alessia Anastassopulos.