Panel: ON CONSERVATION



1.16 - CONSERVATION THROUGH DIFFERENCE. METAPHYSICAL ACCOUNTS ON MATTER AND SOUND.

AUTHORS:
Giampieri G. (University of Bologna ~ Bologna ~ Italy)
Text:
Notions of interpretation and translation look unfolding something that is preserved amid transformations. This conservation or persistence of sense beyond the matters the meanings are expressed through release a continuity of structural differences beyond time, modes of existence and enunciations where meaning and matter are perpetually reconfigured to maintain a structure from a process to another. From an apparently distant line of works yet resonant landscape of practices, the new achievements in recycling and upcycling unfold the framework of a material continuity evading physical, practical and semantic degradation abolishing the status of waste and turn it into a resource within a (potential) endless loop of conservation through transformations. Ecological perspectives, semioticians, material designers and anthropologists are claiming the presence of an underpinning dialogue between makers-enunciators and matter, whereas continuity dispels dualisms and advocating for a major effort towards "listening the materials". In this respect, the proposal analyses how the metaphysics of sound might be a reliable candidate to bind these heterogeneous domains to properly enquire the issue of conservation. The auspicious premises of Vedic lineage and Indian medieval grammars later linked to Tantric tradition anticipated with striking clarity that all reality unfolds from sound and language maintaining a cosmotheandric vision in which word, world, and self emerge as modulations of the same sonic field, allows to see today semiotic, material, and sacred alterations as not simply severing continuity, but to reveal it. These ancient traditions rhyme with contemporary metaphysical accounts by composers and philosophers detecting sound as not merely a metaphor of conservation but a mode of ontological continuity. Conservation, then, becomes not an act of resistance to change, but of attuned participation in ongoing transformation sustaining continuity through difference.