Abstract
«Sound of Shanghai» is a sonic portrait that interweaves past culture and contemporaneity, East and West, the visible and the invisible. Through the participation of hundreds of musicians and professionals, the project offers an aesthetic and poetic vision of humanity, of the socio-cultural values of the city of Shanghai and its people.
It translates the city’s identity and crystallizes it within the most immediate and powerful dimension: sound. It is a sensorial journey that defies the conventions of time and space, inviting the viewer to listen – as a state of being that allows one to consciously inhabit the present.
It is an opus of connection, trust, and light – an artistic manifesto that celebrates the generative power of listening.
«Sound of Shanghai» is an audiovisual opus that delves into the cultural depth of the city. It safeguards its identity and narrates its essence through sound – a universal language, an invisible bridge between memory and the future, a vessel of meaning and semantics. To grasp and truly behold the soul of the project – and the yearning that animates it – one must embark on a broader reflection on the human condition and the manifold ways in which we inhabit the world.
We live in the time of hyperconnection, of perpetual sharing, and yet, rooted in origins that are distant, origins that know history – memory of life itself – we still preserve, unchanged, the desire to listen, and to be listened to. Our spirit lives through this need.
Art is a mirror upon which the reflection of the human condition reveals itself – and it is in gazing into that reflection that awareness begins. Humanity is fragile, and its balance, dwelling on the breath of a flute, not falling, but resisting – projecting encounter, evading solitude. The human being is complex, and arduous is our journey across this earth, through this existence for which we find ourselves, second by second, unprepared – unfit. We run for shelter, from ourselves, from life. Yes, we live on the defensive, in waiting – we live the wait.
Art is a vessel of consciousness, of evolution, of thought. Its transformative power is both essential and enriching. Rarest are the moments, brief and infinite like snapshots, in which we reveal ourselves to ourselves. In these moments, art makes us capable – as though we had always been – of reading our metaphors, unfolding our mystery.
«Sound of Shanghai» is the sonic portrait of a city, a people, a culture, a fragment of humanity — of artistic potential. It takes ears to see it, and eyes to hear it. A visionary manifesto that narrates the concentric circles of sound and human relations, of their plot and trajectories. It is sound that crystallizes the ambition to recount complexity and the allure that complexity can generate.
«Sound of Shanghai» is the audiovisual mosaic of humanity and its stories, of the form and uniqueness they assume in moments of ensemble. The desire to share has been both the place and the soul of the process that brought «Sound of Shanghai» to life — that drew a sound out of the stagnant, almost visible silence of our existences, when deprived of listening.
Shanghai is not merely a backdrop – it is a living protagonist. It is identity itself: the place where the project is born, where all things converge, are transformed, and, in turn, transform. The city of Shanghai is the stage for a magical encounter, unbound by the logic with which we usually think of it – time. A fold in reality emerging from the wondrous collision of cultural heritage that dialogues with the future. Ancient melodies and the city’s sonic past become, along with Shanghai itself, music that breathes – an entity that lives and expresses itself.
Sound – the particle of music and the nucleus of the project – connects epochs, philosophies, and visions into a single, unified tapestry. «Sound of Shanghai» is the embroidery of a music that is aesthetic: of lives, of stories; a conjunction between past and present. It is an exploration of philosophies that narrate our posture, how we stand in the world.
«Opera of Cosmopolis» evokes the inspiration that blows from the past, from the melodies of the Kunqu opera «The Peony Pavilion», carried by a wind of words that dialogues with the present — a process of re-imagining contemporaneity.
«Sound of Shanghai» narrates the city’s deep soul, the invisibility of its socio-cultural crossings, made manifest by its sonic portrait.
In an era marked by noise and speed, the project stands as an artistic and creative act – a manifesto of awareness. In the uproar of contemporaneity, sound is the representation of our presence in the world. «Sound of Shanghai» re-categorizes belonging to the world, to reality. It is therefore the attempt to read reality – to inhabit it. To re-code the socio-cultural dimensions of a people and how the world perceives them. To shape these as elements of form and poetics through the medium of sound. To stimulate hearing as a voluntary, selective sense – as human consciousness.
The project cradles time – allowing it to resound anew, in harmony with all that is yet to unfold. «Sound of Shanghai» is light; it illuminates the life of the past, what resists, what survives oblivion and reaches the present. Thus, art serves life, and life, in turn, serves art. And existence is made of individuals who relinquish their individuality, who forget it, return it in favor of creation. «Sound of Shanghai» lives in this creation, which in its ultimate sense is life. It exists through a luminous human availability that has been the cradle of the project.
Hundreds of musicians and professionals have surrendered to one another, to discovery of the other, they have swallowed the mystery of following trajectories so ambitious, so distant, that only their beginning could be seen. The mystery of trust – the brightest and most powerful of human things. The origin of that which was not, and is created. They were able to see with different eyes, yet the same gaze – faithful to the same vision, to the same desire and its permanence.
The human and artistic synergy fostered by the work becomes a testament to the extraordinary and tangible possibility of mutual listening – of sound as its very conduit. They played shoulder to shoulder; they listened, and were listened to. Witnesses of the other’s creative flow, of its rhythm – which they made their own. They played music that narrates China, that explores it, that becomes a vector of its essence, and which carries its scent.
They are signifier, and at once, signified. They are the tangibility of an invisible link that binds past, present, and future. They give back Shanghai’s story to the world, rendering it an artistic and aesthetic manifesto of humanity — a story through which China reveals itself to the world, and the world rediscovers itself through China.
«Sound of Shanghai» breaks the usual boundaries of the audio-visual opera, of language as we have always conceived it. It is a journey – of possibilities and the echoes of its stories. The wonder for what has been, and the nostalgia for what will come.
In its unfolding, the work transcends every traditional boundary, reshapes perception, and gives rise to connection. «Sound of Shanghai» opens spaces – within people, between people. It shatters the conviction that the spectator, in his experience of being a spectator, belongs to a precise time and space, and is confined to them. It gifts the sense of departure, the abandonment of fixity and limit. It is the illusion of a past that can be reached, not only through the haze of memory – a past that stands in service of the future.
It is the ambition of «Sound of Shanghai» to see time – past, present, and future – as accessible. As drawers from which to retrieve answers that may become coordinates and trajectories.
«Sound of Shanghai» is the attempt to pause time and lay it at the service of the viewer’s consciousness. It is trust in the past, an indispensable map for inhabiting the present, to deconstruct it, to choose and decide what to make of the future.
The essence of the work lies in the human desire to endure, to leave a trace of oneself, and to comprehend the act of both departing and dwelling in this world. The sound of this desire is a potent and unequivocal imprint. The project captures this sound and offers it back to the world in its entirety.
«Sound of Shanghai» is, at its source, the gesture of holding onto the world – and, at once, the attempt to remain holding on. It reflects on our presence in the world and what we contribute to the space-time continuum that surrounds us.
Audio is the most powerful tool for experiencing history. To listen is the most human of verbs.