Emotional Geography

The Emotional Geography series is the result of Alocci’s extensive travels over the past years, as wherever she visits she records the world around her. This documentation has evolved into a personal archive for the artist, containing not just all the photographic and sonic data she has amassed but also the memories and emotions attached to her recorded experiences.

Each of the limited edition prints in the collection captures two different moments in one artwork: The first is the audio recording from each city, as seen in the white spheres made up of thousands of tendril-like individual lines, and the second is Alocci’s own heartbeat, with her pulse taken as she listens back to the original recording. The heartbeat on each print is seen in the dotted line orbiting the central circle, a hand-finished chrome detail by the artist. 

The importance of the second and reactive listening is that Alocci only records specific moments of overwhelming happiness; these can occur randomly and spontaneously, but when they do the artist is impelled to record her immediate environment to remember the experience, immortalising what would otherwise be an ephemeral instant. Listening to the audio of the moment is akin to reliving it for the artist, and the physical response to this wave of happy memory is what is recorded in the heartbeat on each print.

Central to Alocci’s practice is the way sound can potently retrigger emotions, and transport the artist back to the time and place of each city, able to reconstruct a moment and tell a story from only the recorded sound clips. It is rare that a personal story linked to a certain phenomenon can be relatable for others who were not present at the time, yet it is a specific motivation for Alocci to translate intimate and objective data into relatable and comprehensible narratives for audiences.

Images: 1: ‘Berlin’, 2: ‘Genoa’, 3: ‘Mexico City’. 

Tiziana Alocci often describes her artistic practice as “inevitable” due to her experience with OCD. Her compulsions have always led her to record and document her life through many different forms, from scribbling notes of numbers to taking photographs or recording sounds.

Her need to document her life, keeping track of numbers, words, shapes, places, sounds and even smells, means her work is intrinsically linked to data. The artist admits, “I wouldn’t be able to make an artwork out of just an idea. It must come from something that has a meaning and a value for me. It has to tell a story.” 

Using this motivation to her advantage, for over 12 years she has bridged art and science by visually transforming a plethora of data into facts and stories. The process of data visualisation and information design is analogous to a metaphor, in its ability to communicate complex truths in an accessible and comprehensible way.

Alocci explains, “There are no random elements in my works. What you see is the direct visualisation of sound. It’s very important to me that everything you see has a story attached”

Images: 1: ‘Budapest’, 2: ‘New York City’, 3: ‘London’. 

Sound is a complexly layered medium. Primarily it carries descriptive information; recognisable noises of everything from birds to buses. But its waves also carry technical information, such as frequency, melody and rhythm, and most importantly emotional information, able to trigger memories.

Alocci’s work operates on two levels, firstly documenting how certain places and environments can make us feel and behave, and secondly through exploring the transportive effects of sound and its relationship to memory. “When I play with sound, I can return to the place it describes and remember exactly where I was, maybe even remembering the smell and the atmosphere and who I was with.”

Our brains are hardwired to prioritise remembering emotionally charged experiences, as they are often linked to survival. The amygdala plays a significant role in this, strengthening memory consolidation when emotions are involved, often resulting in other influences like sounds associated with these strong emotions becoming deeply ingrained in our memories. Alocci’s practice has explored our evolutionary hard-wiring for over a decade, tapping into her own emotional history and finding novel aesthetic ways to translate these experiences to a shared, global, audience.