Zêlos: From Memory to Becoming. Through the Interface
Workshop on the creative process and the intermedial experience
19, 20, 21 October | 10.00 am > 4.00 pm
Church of Santa Caterina da Siena
Zêlos: From Memory to Becoming.
Through the Interface
Intensive Workshop led by Pier Alfeo
Participation in the workshop is free; to register, please complete the following form.
Zêlos does not begin on 24 October. It begins earlier — the moment someone decides to approach what cannot yet be seen, the submerged work that precedes every form. This workshop is that moment: three days in which the creative process of the work is opened up, inhabited and tested together with the public and with the voices that will bring the opening performance to life.
The guiding thread is a simple and radical question: what happens to those who enter an intermedial work? What do they become in the time they spend passing through it?
Day I – What Cannot Be Seen
Il primo giorno è dedicato a tutto ciò che l’opera non mostra ma contiene: il percorso di ricerca sulla tradizione musicale napoletana, lo studio della figura di Francesco Provenzale, la scelta delle catene di Markov come strumento di rianimazione algoritmica del linguaggio compositivo. Si entra nel sistema di ascolto proprietario, nel loop di feedback, nella logica del granulatore che si accorda alle frequenze di risonanza della chiesa – una navigazione condivisa nell’invisibile dell’opera.
Day II – What One Is
The second day shifts the focus from the creative process to the body of those who enter the space. Through sessions of guided listening, direct interaction with the installation system and professional recording of the participants’ acoustic presences, it explores the condition of those who — on entering the work — become an active and unwitting element of it. The public does not observe the interface but inhabits it, passes through it, alters it.
Day III – What Becomes
The third day is a threshold: technical rehearsals and performative experimentation, in which the acoustic space of the Cantoria is tuned to the system, the voices are woven into the flow of the work, and the performance takes its final form — or rather its possible form, since every execution will be unrepeatable. The public present is already part of the work.
The workshop is conceived as an intermedial experience in its own right: it does not recount Zêlos, it passes through it.
Zêlos: From Memory to Becoming is part of theTimeless project, curated by Fondazione Pietà de’ Turchini and supported by Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, with the contributions of Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale | MUSA, of Ministero della Cultura and of Regione Campania.
The initiative is promoted and co-financed by Comune di Napoli nwithin its 2026/2027 cultural programme.
Zêlos: From Memory to Becoming. Through the Interface
Pier Alfeo (1985)is a sound and intermedia artist. His research moves within the threshold where sound is not yet music but behaviour, putting the repetitiveness of algorithmic systems into tension with the unpredictability of chaos, pursuing an authentic vision of collaboration between human and non-human.
He trained in Electronic Composition, Music Informatics and Multimedia at the Conservatory “N. Piccinni” of Bari and subsequently at the Conservatory “San Pietro a Majella” of Naples, under the guidance of Francesco Scagliola, Roberto Pugliese and Elio Martusciello. He further deepened his practice with a certificate in Machine Learning for Musicians and Artists with Rebecca Fiebrink (Goldsmiths University of London), and studies in sonic ecology with Makis Solomos and Daniel Teruggi.
His work has been presented at international venues and festivals, including the SMC Conference (Graz), MA/IN Matera Festival (Matera), NODE Festival (Frankfurt), Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ (Amsterdam), Electric Audio Unit (Tallinn), CultureHub (Seoul), LiveCinema Festival (Rome), and Flussi Festival (Avellino). Solo exhibitions include Incisione su Silenzio (Doppelgaenger Gallery, Bari, 2019) and Possible Infinities (Luigi Nono Festival, Carlo Scarpa’s Garden, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, 2025).
He was a finalist at the Re:Humanism Art Prize (2023), winner in the Electronic Arts section of the Premio Nazionale delle Arti (2019) and of the “Dynamic Display” award at Biennale Tecnologia in Turin (2020), and was awarded an artistic research residency by La Quadriennale di Roma at the School of Digital Arts in Manchester. In 2025, in collaboration with Italy’s National Research Council (CNR), he presents the paper Marine Soundscape Ecosystems at Risk: A Data-Driven Spatial-Sound Interactive Experience to Raise Awareness at the SMC Conference in Graz. He is also a lecturer in Systems, Technologies, Applications and Programming Languages for Multimedia at the Conservatory “N. Piccinni” of Bari.