RESOUNDING (2026)
Essay written by Imke Felicitas Gerhardt
 
As the mouth touches the flute’s opening, the body remembers how to shape the lips and compress the breath, allowing warm air to pass through the cold silver. Both bodies now breathe and sound. For a moment, they encounter one another in vibration. 
Resounding (2026) by Maddalena Iodice, unfolds as an acoustic and corporeal act of remembrance. It surfaces from within the body to deconstruct what that same body has internalized; it is an attempt to reclaim voice and cultivate a practice sensitive to the micro-events of human communication and the constructs of language.
The voice streams through Iodice’s mouth, opening to an unconscious current, a space that refuses fixed points of reference. Her sounds spill beyond the linear, ordered relation of time and space that the metronome, playing beside the performer, seeks to impose through its relentless measure. Perhaps it is precisely this simultaneity, of an ordered, rational structure from which the moving body and the sonic current both escape, that constitutes the philosophical weight of Iodice’s work. 
Such tension first becomes audible in the performance before materializing in the mixed-media installation Resounding, (fragments), (2026), which encompasses video, sound, and painting. The canvases on display bear the imprint of the somatic dialogue between body, voice and flute, recording its shared pulse. Yet unlike a vibrograph, they do not promise a precise left-to-right documentation. Instead, they trace, in sonic colours, the affects carried by, and emerging from, the encounter between Iodice and the instrument. The canvas does not close upon itself as a record, but opens outward, becoming itself a carrier of affect and entering into relation with the viewer.
As much as this inscription of the signifying body speaks of a subjective experience, Iodice's work is equally a reflection on Western logocentrism, which has long bound the voice exclusively to language and rationality, as though it possessed no sonorous physicality, as though it had no corporeal form.
The title, Resounding, may signify a return to the relation through which sound first occurs. Or perhaps the prefix re- refers not to a return at all, but to the exchange itself: the sometimes harmonious, at other times ruptured, back-and-forth between the artist and the flute. It names the interval between bodies, the in-between where breath becomes sound, and sound becomes relation.