Kehä-festivaali

Sonic Migrations – credits Hugo Santos – Giulia Cat

Giulia Gallina (ITA)
Sonic Migrations

Sonic Migrations is an intimate electroacoustic ritual where touch becomes music. The body maps a shifting journey through memory and place, activating sound fragments, echoes of travel and imagined landscapes shaped in real time.

Duration 15min.

Credits Hugo Santos

How did you come to create this piece?

Sonic Migrations was born from a desire to explore sound not just as a medium of expression, but as a space of intimate transformation. My previous works – such as “Ancient Voices of the Island” and “Home, the Art of Listening” – already reflected a strong interest in sound as memory, as geography, as invisible architecture. 

With this piece, I wanted to go further: to bring the audience not only into the heart of a sonic landscape, but into the heart of themselves.


As an artist, I am fascinated by the simultaneous coexistence of contrasting and often contradictory emotional or psychological landscapes within each person. 

This performance allowed me to explore that tension through a sound art perspective, using the body as the bridge between inner and outer geographies. The participant’s gestures and impulses don’t just trigger sound, they compose a music that is entirely theirs: fleeting, raw, and unrepeatable.

Greetings from you, the artist, to the visitors of the festival

Thank you for being here. Sonic Migrations is an invitation to listen differently: to sound, to space, to yourself. This piece unfolds through your presence, your gestures, your energy. Enter with curiosity, and let the experience take you somewhere just beyond the usual maps.

What will happen during the performance?

Sonic Migrations is an electroacoustic performance for a single participant, where touch and presence generate sound in real time. Using a system that transforms skin contact into musical impulses, the listener’s body becomes both performer and instrument, shaping an evolving sonic environment.

The piece reimagines travel as an internal journey, where sound replaces movement and interaction creates a dynamic landscape of shifting frequencies.
Through electronic textures, field recordings, and vocal processing, the performance reconstructs sonic fragments of distant places, memories, and imagined geographies. The listener’s gestures activate and alter these layers, forging a unique auditory path with each interaction.

Blurring the boundaries between composition, performance, and immersive experience, Sonic Migrations invites deep listening and heightened sensory awareness.

Beneath its tactile and spatial surface, the piece opens a more intimate dimension: a journey inward, where hidden memories, emotions, or states of being may rise to the surface. Each performance is unrepeatable – shaped by the listener’s energy, intuition, and vulnerability – revealing landscapes not only external, but deeply personal and often unknown.

What does one-to-one art bring to you as an artist?


Working one-to-one brings a kind of presence and intimacy that is both fragile and powerful. It removes performance from spectacle and returns it to connection – slow, direct, unfiltered. It allows me to respond to the energy of a single human being in real time, and to offer them a space where their subconscious, often silenced or fragmented, can speak in sound.


This kind of work sharpens my listening, deepens my intuition, and reinforces something I believe deeply: that art is not separate from us. It is us, expanding outward.  In Sonic Migrations, the audience’s body becomes the instrument, and their energy becomes music. And in that fragile, shared moment, I too am transformed.

Who is the one you wish to experience your work?

I imagine this work being experienced by someone unafraid to travel deep into their own abyss – someone curious about what lies beneath the surface of their identity, emotions, and memory. I hope it reaches those who are willing to listen not only with their ears, but with their skin, their breath, their silence.

The ideal listener is someone who enjoys navigating the unknown, both within and beyond themselves, someone who embraces disorientation as part of discovery, who welcomes the beautiful and mysterious creatures that dwell in the shadowy corners of the self.

I hope to meet someone who sees art not just as a mirror, but as a portal: a chance to step out of their comfort zone and return transformed, however subtly. That is the listener Sonic Migrations waits for.

Gallina participated in the One-to-One Art residency in summer 2025.
The work will also be shown at the One-to-One Festival in Oeiras, Portugal in November.

Giulia Gallina / Sonic Migrations
Kehä Festival 17.-18.19.2025


Friday
16:10
16:35
17:00
17:25
17:50
18:15

Saturday
14:50 Kehä-Talk: Artists interviews and artworks. Giulia Gallina.
16:00
16:25
16:50
17:15
17:40
19:00
19:25