Near Silence (2026)
KMRU, Fred Odede Sound: 40’
Film: 30:17’
Near Silence is a project produced and curated by ALMARE, involving Berlin-based Kenyan sound artist KMRU and Kenyan filmmaker Fred Odede. Near Silence focuses its research on quiet areas, territories characterized by low levels of anthropogenic noise and an administrative tool regulated by the European Union Directive on Environmental Noise for the protection of silent soundscapes. Traversing these places, the project reflects on sound as an indicator of ecosystem health, on noise as a form of pollution, and, conversely, on silence as a common good to be protected, a condition that enables listening and the relationship between the human and the more-than-human world.
Born from a dialogue with the Acoustics Laboratory of the Department of Energy (DENERG) of the Polytechnic of Turin and with ARPA Liguria, engaged in the mapping of quiet areas , the project developed through a residency in the Beigua Park in the Ligurian Apennines, recognized as a UNESCO Global Geopark.
Through the use of field recordings, KMRU's artistic research explores the power of listening as a political, ecological, and social practice. Through environmental recordings and interviews with the local Beigua community, Near Silence investigates the transformations of the soundscape and the multiple agencies of silence: on the one hand, as ecocide , the suppression of the plurality of voices in the natural world, and on the other, as a shared resource to be protected.
In the composition, KMRU intertwines field-collected materials with synthesis and analog processes, working on the thresholds of stillness and on sounds that approach the inaudible without ever reaching silence. Wind, insects, footsteps, water, rocks, birds, human voices, background noise, and the microphone itself become part of the work. The recording is therefore not intended as a transparent documentation of the landscape: each device and each act of listening introduces its own presence, highlighting the distance between what is heard, recorded, and ultimately reproduced.
Presented for the first time in Turin for the Spellbound Festival curated by ALMARE, Near Silence arrives at Sensing the Climate at the end of a mini-residency oriented towards adaptation for the multi-channel greenhouse system.
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Near Silence examines the thresholds of quiet through sonic weavings of field recordings, synthesis and saturation of quiet waveforms. The piece poses the impossibility of documentation, proposing that every act of listening and recording introduces its own material presence. The 40-minute composition draws on field recordings from Liguria, Italy, processed through analogue circuitry and synthesis, and woven with musical gestures that continually approach, but never arrive at silence. Wind, insects, footsteps, water, rocks, birds, humans, ground, noise and the microphone become significant sonic actors throughout the composition, in dialogue with each other as a silent score of a place recorded yet still present.
These soundings are not treated as artefacts to be removed but as evidence of the conditions through which listening is produced. Quiet emerges as thresholds at which acoustics and mediation allow one to perceive a sound. Near silence doesn’t document the landscape; rather, it reveals the discrepancy between what is heard, recorded, and reproduced - a becoming of a speculative score.
Extended durations and motifs that resist narrative progression run throughout the piece in limens of quiet, gradually from near-inaudibility to dissolves of texture, field recording and hums. Presented as a quadraphonic piece, it also questions the ontology of silence through transduction itself. If every loudspeaker introduces its own noise floor, every recording its own material residue, and every listener their own perceptual threshold, can these silent waveforms survive mediation?
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Near Silence is a project produced and curated by ALMARE with the support of the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation under the Starter call for proposals, in partnership with Kilowatt.bo and in collaboration with DENERG (Politecnico di Torino), ARPA Liguria, ARPA Valle d'Aosta, Het Nieuwe Instituut, and the Turin Botanical Garden.
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Research Night: Near Silence: The Politics of Quiet
28 May 2026 19:00 - 21:00
This public gathering invites practitioners to reflect on ‘the politics of quiet,’ asking how sound might indicate the health of more-than-human environments, what interventions are possible within human-dominated soundscapes, and how ‘noise’ and ‘silence’ are socially constructed. With Through Sounds, ALMARE, KMRU, Katía Truijen (Loom), and Martina Raponi.
This Research Night takes the project Near Silence, curated and produced by ALMARE, as its point of departure. Near Silence focuses on quiet rural and semi-rural areas as key sites for listening to the effects of climate change and the loss of soundscapes. The project brings together sound artist KMRU and filmmaker Fred Odede for a residency in a quiet Alpine region of Northern Italy, where they collect field recordings and speak with local communities.
The roundtable builds on this work, exploring how listening practices connect environments, ways of living and urban spaces, and how technologies shape what we can hear and understand.
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Near Silence Showcases
Septermber 26th - Spellbound Festival, Torino- tickets
October 7th - Serra Madre, Bologna, IT - tickets
November 27th - Triennale Milano - TBA
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NS Residency
May 1- 14th 2026: Liguria, Italy
Photo courtsey of KMRU, Muchomas.project, Luca Vianello