The soundscape project by Antonio De Luca in the Campo dei Giganti

In contemporary discourse on environmental artistic practices, the term “Campo” (field) requires a decontamination from any remaining trace of mere geographical or agricultural definition. On a semiological and scientific level, the Campo never constitutes a flat surface to be occupied or a neutral scenographic backdrop; it is the definition of a place of forces in perpetual tension, a dynamic and relational configuration traversed by physical vectors, biological frequencies, historical sedimentations, and future resonances. In this perspective fits the “Listening Zone” designed by Antonio De Luca: not a simple exhibition area or a topographic perimetration, but – on the contrary—a sensitive and germinative opening of relationship. Designed to integrate among the century-old olive trees of the Campo dei Giganti, the project rejects the logic of static installation to become an energetic catalyst, a true “device” (dispositivo). Here, De Luca’s artistic research –developed along a fluid boundary where plastic consistency meets the immaterial nature of sound – finds a rigorous synthesis. Far from mere exhibition, the sculpture is a vibratory organism capable of modifying the stance of the viewer/listener. For De Luca, in fact, sound is “the most subtle of possible sculptures”: a paradigm in which form does not stop at the physical margins of the object, but propagates through space in the form of frequency, re-educating toward listening and waiting.

The viewer suddenly finds themselves in front of a mysterious golden cube: a sharp and rigorous Euclidean geometry that grafts itself with grace into the sinuosity of the ancient trunks of the Giants. The archaic and precious gilding recalls the dimension of the sacred, transforming the resonance box into a place of threshold, amplifying the contemplative mission lying within the wounds of the Campo. The rigidity of the volume and the mechanical tension of the work intercept the thrust of the wind, the traction of the trees, the micro-vibrations of the sap, and the symbolic charge of the site, in poetic communion with the natural scenery whitewashed in lime by Ulderico Tramacere and with its relational vocation.

Acting as a true phonophore, De Luca does not “play” nature, but constructs the physical conditions so that the relationship of listening can be fulfilled, allowing sound to be welcomed into everyone’s intimacy.

In a contemporary context dominated by hyper-visibility, image saturation, and consumption, the Listening Zone configures itself as a radical ecology of attention. The auditory experience is never passive, but is theorized by the artist as a poetic and philosophical action: “creating a void and inhabiting it”, following the notion of epoché, or the suspension of judgment. Creating the void means deactivating the background noise of habit in order to establish a condition of waiting. The device in fact functions even in the absence of wind: it is an architecture of presence that invites one to stop, listening to unprecedented, continually renewed intimate resonances.

Expanding the notion of soundscape theorized by Schafer, in the Listening Zone experience does not develop within the circumscribed refuge of an hortus conclusus, but moves outward from the margin, from an open and vulnerable boundary where wounded nature meets human perception. The pause thus becomes an act of perceptive democracy: the Listening Zone becomes a threshold of welcome, of a shared exploration, where the body merges into a receptive and responsive unicuum. Listening is elevated to an ethical and political stance of Care, a disposition that tunes the person’s perceptual apparatus to the slow and deep frequencies of the Earth.

Setting up a Listening Zone means interrogating the memory of the place and intercepting its eco-resonant qualities; at the center of De Luca’s poetics lies a rigorous research aimed at freeing the intrinsic acoustics of raw matter before it becomes entangled in language and its arbitrary or dominant use. Relying on the laws of physical acoustics, the mechanics of materials, and the tension of voids, the artist generates a live, unpredictable, and changing acoustic texture, reactive to the shifting of the elements. Architecture itself becomes an extension of the work, and the viewer/listener, traversing this field of forces, ceases to be a mere observer to become an integral part of the sound event – rediscovering that within the apparent void of silence lies the deepest form of aesthetic experience, in the contemplation of impermanence.

The intervention in the Campo dei Giganti does not arise in isolation, but positions itself coherently within a thirty-year trajectory of research in which Antonio De Luca has redefined the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, and acoustic ecology, exploring sound as a plastic material and a matrix of relationship with the Umwelt (the perceptual environment-world). This tension is rooted in his history: from his early experiences in the 1990s with participation in informal groups such as Starter, to the genesis of his Garden-laboratory in Galugnano and later in the Lecce stone quarry in Cursi, where sound was born from a dialogue with the geomorphological specificity of the territory.

From historic experiments on the resonant cavities of stone and metallic surfaces to the use of tubular ducts and tension systems, De Luca has always rejected the idea of sculpture as an inert visual fetish, conceiving it instead as a site-specific acoustic organ. In the Campo dei Giganti, this vision exalts the dimension of public art as an open social device and a collective resource. Sculpture is transformed into a prosthesis of resonance through which the landscape recovers its primordial song: giving voice to the olive trees wounded and devastated by the plague of Xylella is an act of symbolic, political, and civic regeneration. Rooted as a shared gesture, the Listening Zone engages the community in a collective ritual wherein the memory of the killed olive trees awakens, reconciling the presence of humanity with the wound, but above all with the sacred force of the Earth.

Zona d’Ascolto by Antonio de Luca, A soundscape project. Il Campo dei Giganti, September 6, 2026. Il Campo dei Giganti, community art project by Ulderico Tramacere. Text by Chiara Agagiù.