UNIT London: Emotional Geography

The Emotional Geography series is the result of Alocci’s extensive travels over the past years, as wherever she visits she records the world around her. This documentation has evolved into a personal archive for the artist, containing not just all the photographic and sonic data she has amassed but also the memories and emotions attached to her recorded experiences.

Each of the limited edition prints in the collection captures two different moments in one artwork: The first is the audio recording from each city, as seen in the white spheres made up of thousands of tendril-like individual lines, and the second is Alocci’s own heartbeat, with her pulse taken as she listens back to the original recording. The heartbeat on each print is seen in the dotted line orbiting the central circle, a hand-finished chrome detail by the artist.

Learn more about the series here.

Tiziana Alocci
'Emotional Geography', 2024
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemuhle German Etching 310gsm paper, with cut edges.
Hand-finished by the artist with chrome ink details.
Hand-signed and numbered by the artist
9 x Editions of 3
70 x 70 cm

The nine cities Alocci transformed from sonic data into fine art prints include Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Genoa, Holbox, London, Mexico City, New York City, and Venice.

The importance of the second and reactive listening is that Alocci only records specific moments of overwhelming happiness; these can occur randomly and spontaneously, but when they do the artist is impelled to record her immediate environment to remember the experience, immortalising what would otherwise be an ephemeral instant. Listening to the audio of the moment is akin to reliving it for the artist, and the physical response to this wave of happy memory is what is recorded in the heartbeat on each print.

Central to Alocci’s practice is the way sound can potently retrigger emotions, and transport the artist back to the time and place of each city, able to reconstruct a moment and tell a story from only the recorded sound clips. It is rare that a personal story linked to a certain phenomenon can be relatable for others who were not present at the time, yet it is a specific motivation for Alocci to translate intimate and objective data into relatable and comprehensible narratives for audiences.