LIVE PERFORMANCE
Sonic dialogue for wordless soprano and acoustic trumpet by Nina Baietta within CILIA, solo show of Léa Dumayet

In the soft late-morning light of Venice on 19 September, EdB Contemporary and Léa Dumayet invite the public to follow Nina Baietta as she steps into CILIA, Dumayet’s immersive installation in the historic Galleria dei Gondolieri, with a live vocal performance.

Using metal, suspended glass, light and scent, Léa has given material form to airflow and to the body’s continuous state of re-equilibration. Breath, an immediate sign of life, is also where Baietta’s practice begins. Sharing overlapping tessituras, stripped of semantic language, the voice of the artist as an internal bodily column of air governed by pressure, and the trumpet of Giovanni Nevyjel as an externalized anatomical conduit, mirror each other in a continuous calibration of timbre.

EdB Contemporary will be open from 10 am. Visitors are welcome to arrive earlier, meet Léa Dumayet and Andrea Bordács, and experience their exhibitions. At 11 am, as the performance begins, the doors will close for its 30-minute duration to preserve the listening conditions. In case of late arrival, please contact us via WhatsApp at +33 7 68 43 86 12.

***

In resonance with Léa Dumayet’s Cilia, this acoustic performance explores sound as a tactile, invisible current that inhabits and reshapes space. Structured as an intimate convergence between a wordless soprano voice and an acoustic trumpet, the performance investigates the threshold where two distinct sound bodies dissolve into a single, breathing organism.

Sharing identical tessituras, the voice and the trumpet mirror each other in a continuous calibration of timbre. Stripped of semantic language, the voice of Nina Baietta returns to its primordial state: an internal column of air governed by pressure, expressing itself through a precise gestural vocabulary. In parallel, the trumpet of Giovanni Nevyjel acts as an externalized anatomical conduit: a resonant brass tube vibrating in direct continuity with the human respiratory tract.

Drawing from the biological and evolutionary reflections of David George Haskell (Sounds Wild and Broken), the performance recalls how the earliest forms of hearing and movement emerged from microscopic cilia, the hair-like mechanoreceptors that translate mechanical vibrations into living perception. In Dumayet’s installation, the suspended glass forms (Cils and Tubas) hold material in tension at the edge of instability; in the performance, this delicate equilibrium is translated into sound gestures.

Through synchronized physical gestures, where hands shape and mute the aperture of both the mouth and the bell of the instrument, the performers sculpt the breath without fixing it, echoing Dumayet’s Souffle series. Breath becomes both the modeling force and the fragile membrane connecting inner anatomy with the surrounding space, making the imperceptible tangible through resonance, tension, and shared air.
– Nina Baietta

Nina Baietta (1997) is a Venice-based vocal researcher. She trained as a singer at the Francesco Venezze Conservatory in Rovigo and the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice. During her formative years, she attended numerous masterclasses in improvisation and contemporary music at Tempo Reale (Florence), Accademia Chigiana (Siena), and the Giorgio Cini Foundation (Venice). Some of her works have been presented at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice), Trinity College (London), and L’Abri (Geneva).

Her artistic practice is oriented toward the study of the voice in its gestural dimension, through the somatic exploration of transcultural vocal techniques and workshop-based activities as a device for horizontal research. What is the relationship between voice and language? Does a purely vocal-gestural human communication exist? And how does it relate to the singing voice and vocal/choral music? These are the inputs that drive her research, resulting in works of various forms such as solo performances, workshop-based pieces, local curatorial activities, choral shows, and installations. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice (2024-2026).
IG: @ninabaietta

Cover image: Simone Fancello