The Andalusian geographer al-Idrisi of Ceuta, who from 1138 was at the court of King Roger II, reports that “all around Palermo the land is crossed by waters springing from perennial sources” and observes that in the “Borgo,” the area outside the old city, located both to the South and North of the Cassaro, “there were many gardens and beautiful villas through which flowed channels of fresh, running water that came from the mountains surrounding its plain.

[From the introduction to Palermo Sotterranea, by Pietro Todaro]

Inside the air-raid bunker of Palazzo Castelnuovo, Federico Pipia explores the qanāt as a symbolic, cultural and metaphorical space: an underground network of water channels that becomes a map of Palermo’s buried memory.

The installation connects, “electrically”, a multichannel sound intervention distributed throughout the bunker with geographical maps of Palermo Sotterranea, inspired by Professor Pietro Todaro’s studies and mappings of the city’s ancient water channels.

Resonances, voices, texts and instruments of a ghostly underground emerge as the remains of a layered city that, as it moves and lives, constantly forgets and renews its uses, its work and its sounds.

Each soundscape, linked to a specific qanāt, was composed in quadraphonic format through recordings of voices and traditional Sicilian instruments: tammuru, marranzanu, brogna, friscalettu and chitarra battenti. Reflecting the parallel between audio and water channels, the same cables carrying the signal from the central structure to the speakers trace the qanāt across four maps of the city.

Every soundscape can be activated by the audience through its dedicated electric switch, interrupting the previous flow and bringing a different fragment of the underground city to the surface.