Ex Silens
from the series I Am Your Body -->Marco Donnarumma
26.11.2025 21.00
KUBE [performance] | Dirch Passers Allé 8A
Ex Silens combines movement, sound, space and technology to dive deep into the corporeal knowledge at the edges of experience.
The piece invites audiences into a radically alternative sensorium, a perceptual place where the
“normal” does not exist. Here they encounter an otherworldly, ingenuous creature and a bare bones, posthuman totem. With the audience as accomplices, the creature and the totem touch and fuse with one another, entering a material, sonic, and conceptual feedback. Tender and extreme at once, Ex Silens is a ritual of sensory reorganization. An audiovisual composition experienced through subwoofers, an ambisonic speaker system and a rig of interactive lights produce trance-inducing seismic waves, while a choreography of touch, caresses and improvised interactions unites audience and performer in a strange and engrossing intimacy.
Cochlear implants and AI hearing algorithms are extracted from their capitalist black box,
subverted and turned into sonic organs with their own agencies. They respond to the creature’s
movement, mingle with the public and amplify sounds from muscles, heart and blood to
physically diffuse them, literally, through the bodies of the audience.
These new organs, conceived and handcrafted by the artist, are far from individual aiding tools;
they are organs of sharing. They do not try to repair a loss, but rather magnify a kaleidoscopic
sound world that has always been there, mobilizing thus collective, sensible forms of being.
Ex Silens offers a complete audiovisual experience to d/Deaf and hearing audiences. Each
individual can participate in the performance according to their sensory configurations. Ex Silens
is part of I Am Your Body (2022-present), a series of works investigating deafness, sound, and
(artificial) intelligence through research driven by d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people and
facilitated by Donnarumma – himself late-deafened.
Marco Donnarumma
is an artist working with the human body, sound, and technology. His practice, manifests in the form of performances, installations, films, and photography, maps areas of contamination across art & technology, contemporary performance, and music. His oeuvre confronts normative body politics with uncompromising counter-narratives, where bodies are in tension between control and agency, presence and absence, grace and monstrosity. An inventor with expertise in engineering, computing, and biomechanics, over the past fifteen years he has worked with machine learning, AI, biosensors, robotics, and prosthetics, creating machines that turn the body into a site of resistance and transformation.
Credits:
Concept, artistic direction, performance, choreography, dramaturgy, interactive AI music and
programming: Marco Donnarumma
Prostheses’ concept, morphology, engineering, fabrication and AI programming: Marco
Donnarumma
Collaborative research on hardware and AI software: Intelligent Instruments Lab at the Iceland
University of the Arts
Stage design: Marco Donnarumma, Anna Cingi
Light design: Andrea Familari
Prostheses’ visual design, 3D modeling and 3D printing: Anna Cingi
Additional prostheses’ 3D modeling and 3D printing: Christian Schmidts
Collaborative research group: Wojciech Czernia, Adriane Große, Ann-Catrin Gruber, Martin
Holst, Mara Matzke
Live sound technician: Leon Dohr
Live light operator: Desirée García López
Artwork’s description texts: Marco Donnarumma
Live photography: Eunice Maurice and Stefanie Kulisch for CTM Festival
Photography: Manuel Vason
Video trailer: Marco Donnarumma
Camera for video trailer: Daniele Lucchini
External eye: Margherita Pevere, Jan Rohlf
Production: Kotryna Slapsinskaite
Ex Silens (2024) is an artwork and production by Marco Donnarumma. Co-produced by PACT Ex Silens is an artwork and production by Marco Donnarumma. Co-produced by PACT Zollverein and with scientific support by the Intelligent Instruments Lab at the Iceland University of Arts in Reykjavík. Funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia as a Medienkunstfellow.