Siren Echo

Multi-channel video installation
HD video, sound, 3’40”, looped
Color, stereo sound

Siren Echo is an audiovisual, performative work that explores the inner and outer warning systems of a city suspended between beauty, threat, and transience like no other: Venice. At its core lies the city’s flood siren – the acoustic alarm triggered during acqua alta – which is transformed here into an emotional and artistic call: an inner emergency signal, emerging from the unconscious, the unheard, the underground.

In a series of performative interventions, soprano Johanna Greulich sings at various remote locations around the lagoon – not to an audience, but into emptiness, into distance. Inspired by Il Deserto Rosso and the wordless “ASTRALE” vocalise by Italian composer Giovanni Fusco, her voice becomes a bodily and sonic resonance of a city in suspension: threatened, seductive, melancholic.

In the process, the voice seems to detach from its origin – the body – becoming omnipresent, hovering over the water, permeating space, becoming palpable. It ascends into spheres that connect worlds, stories, and myths – and submerges into the origin of the sirens themselves: into that uncertain place where boundaries dissolve, where transitions form, where something pulses in between.
Oscillating between fear and longing, the voice transforms the function of the siren – from warning signal to an inner chamber of resonance. Beyond the tourist façades, a new perspective on Venice emerges: not as a postcard idyll, but as a porous resonance space where the hidden, the fragile, and the resistant reveal themselves – a constellation of body, water, history, and sound.

WORK IN PROGRESS: This video installation is part of the ongoing development of the book project SIRENS – FOLLOW THE WATER, FOLLOW THE SOUND, curated and edited by Fabienne Liptay and Giuseppe Di Salvatore, published by DIAPHANES (THINK ART) in collaboration with the Institute for Performance and Expanded Cinema.