The long term project of the Italian artistic duo around the trajectories of sound through the Mediterranean sea.
Black Med originates from theoretical reflections on the 'Black Mediterranean', with reference to research by the scholar Alessandra Di Maio. Invernomuto intercepts the sound trajectories crossing the complex and stratified Mediterranean area, tracing its constant movements and the interweaving of events and narratives. Black Med is a project embarked upon in 2018, drawing on an archive of music and sound objects from the protean area of the Mediterranean, in constant evolution, and its main medium is the platform blackmed.invernomuto.info. The archive brings together extracts telling a range of different stories and diasporic paths; the selection is deliberately non-geographical, and contains multiple voices and identities. This book is the result of a long and tentacular journey into the theoretical niches of the subject, bringing together everything that Invernomuto's research has fed off ever since the start of the project, and features a broad spectrum of external contributions.
Invernomuto is the name of the artistic personality created in 2003 by (born 1983 in Piacenza) and Simone Trabucchi (born 1982 in Piacenza). Invernomuto is the author of a series of research projects structured in time and space, from which cycles of interconnected works derive. On a common theoretical basis, Invernomuto tends to think in an open and rhizomatic manner, developing different outputs that take the form of moving images, sounds, performative actions and publishing projects, within the framework of a practice defined by the use—as diffuse as it is precise—of different media. Reality is observed according to documentaristic principles and interests, but for the purpose of creating an imaginative and almost abstract representation, which offers wide margins for reflection and critical interrogation. In particular, Invernomuto investigates subcultural universes, moving through different practices, in which the vernacular language is one way of approaching and appreciating oral cultures and contemporary mythologies, observed with a gaze that aspires to be cross-fertilised and regenerated by it. The declared inauthenticity of some of the materials used plays a fundamental role in this process, which underlines not only the real but also the fictitious and distorted nature of the realities that Invernomuto explores. Founders of the record label and music organization Hundebiss, both artists also develop individual lines of research, with the musical projects Palm Wine and STILL.
Contributions by Maan Abu Taleb, Mattia Capelletti, Iain Chambers, Louis Chude-Sokei, Alessandra Ciucci, Jace Clayton, Alessandra Di Maio, Stathis Gourgouris, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Ayesha Hameed, Carlos Hawthorn, Stefan Helmreich, Abdullah Miniawy, DJ Pery.
