12-04-2026
The project approaches the lake not as a landscape to be represented, but as an active system that generates and transforms the work itself. Photographs taken from and around the water became the visual material for a computational process: custom software transformed the images into sequences of horizontal bands, establishing a correspondence with the broken and unbroken lines of the I Ching hexagrams. Environmental sound captured in real time intervened in this process, affecting the transformation of the images and creating a continuous relationship between what could be seen and what could be heard.
Through this process, the visible landscape was translated into another system of reading. Light, reflections, water, vegetation, and horizon entered into dialogue with the site's changing acoustic conditions. The resulting images were therefore not fixed representations, but temporary configurations emerging from the interaction between landscape, sound and code. The reference to the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, introduced transformation itself as a central principle of the work: the landscape became a field to be read through its continuous variations rather than contemplated as a stable image.
This process extended physically onto the lake through Threshold Opera. Visitors were taken out individually, one at a time, on a boat. During the journey, underwater microphones let them hear sounds from beneath the lake's surface —an acoustic dimension of the environment that normally remains inaccessible. The familiar visual experience of the landscape was thus displaced by an intimate act of listening, revealing another, hidden layer of the same place.
The boat's movement created a passage between land and water, surface and depth, observation and immersion. Rather than positioning the visitor in front of an artwork, Threshold Opera placed them inside a changing perceptual situation in which image, sound, movement, technology and environment continuously affected one another.
The “threshold” of the title therefore refers not to a single boundary, but to a condition of passage: between visible and invisible, above and below the surface, image and sound, landscape and data. Rather than placing an artwork within the landscape, Threshold Opera created a system through which the lake itself could help shape the work and the experience of those who entered it.
Curated by Francesca Ballini (Esperito).