Zêlos. Interpositions Interfaces
Exhibition
24 October | from 6 pm to 1o pm
Church of Santa Caterina da Siena
Zêlos. Interpositions Interfaces
by Pier Alfeo
Free entry
Zêlos is a sculptural and sonic installation that inhabits the Choir Hall of the Church of Santa Caterina da Siena in Naples like an organism held in tension and in listening, becoming the projection surface of an ambiguity that cannot be resolved.
Interfaces suspended in space – sculptural echoes of the convent gelosie, the lattice screens that in this very tradition separated the cloistered nuns from the gaze of the world – build a system of mediation that does not resolve but heightens the condition of the threshold, filtering light, holding back sound, suspending contact at the very moment it promises it.
The work’s title carries an irreducible ambiguity within it. In its Greek root, zêlos wavers between ardent devotion and suffocating possession, between the care that protects and the surveillance that imprisons; the convent gelosie did not choose between these poles but inhabited both with the same structural indifference. Contemporary technology, in the same way – total interface with the world – does not choose either: it empowers and constrains in a single gesture. The skin – first membrane, first boundary, first territory never entirely one’s own – becomes, in the work, the organic correlate of this condition.
The sonic material arises from an operation of analysis and transformation of the writing of Francesco Provenzale – an emblematic figure who, more than any other, inhabited the sonic threshold between the lay world and the cloister of the Neapolitan musical tradition. From his writing, through Markovian processes, a generative code has been extracted: part of its inner grammar, its latent breath. A reanimation by algorithmic means, in which the machine itself becomes an interface of mediation between past and present, between body and data, between listening and control.
The installation’s sculptural nodes – spheres that house the loudspeakers and diffuse sound through the space – carry, incised on their surface, the specific ornamental motif of the gelosie of Santa Caterina da Siena. The original design of separation thus becomes the load-bearing structure of the work, at once visual and acoustic matrix, and the place speaks through its own form.
The work is governed in real time by proprietary software built around a feedback loop mediated by sonic manipulation: a system that listens to the space, reads the church’s own resonant frequencies and continually tunes itself to them, turning the acoustic architecture of the place into a living score. The church sounds through the installation, and every session is unrepeatable, because each act of listening alters what will be heard next.
The listener is not a spectator but a subject traversed by sound, by space, by the history of a boundary that has never ceased to exist and has only changed its name.
Zêlos asks how thin the distance is between those who install an interface in order to connect and those who install it in order to hold back — whether that distance truly exists, or is itself the oldest of the necessary illusions.
Zêlos.Interpositions Interfaces is part of the Timeless 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, Ministero della Cultura, Regione Campania
The initiative is promoted and co-financed by the City of Naples as part of its 2026/2027 cultural programme
Zêlos. Interpositions Interfaces
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.