Other modes of residency

SAVERIO CANTONI: THE OPPOSITE OF SILENCE IS A SHOCKWAVE

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23/04/2026 19:30
Three large textiles float in a darkened room, inscribed with curved, luminescent text that forms a glowing diagram under UV light. Words such as “dislocate,” “sonic imagination,” “care,” “aural,” “amplify,” and “agency” are linked by circular and branching lines. Smaller sound-related terms—“echo,” “reverb,” “hush,” “pulse,” and “tremor”—are scattered along the curves. The installation reads as a radiant map of sonic and political concepts unfolding across the panels.

Installation view of Obstacle Sense, or, A Neuroscientist Told Me That Deafies Can’t Echolocate. A generative spatial sound installation composed of six audio channels, a custom LED panel, and a hand-painted acoustic ceiling. Presented at the Jan van Eyck Open Studios 2025, Maastricht, Netherlands.

Saverio Cantoni: The opposite of silence is a shockwave
Date: Thursday, 2026, April 23. 7:30 pm

Presentation by Saverio Cantoni at the end of their residency at Bulegoa z/b. The opposite of silence is a shockwave is commissioned by Bulegoa z/b as part of access: practices and habits.*

SAVERIO CANTONI: The opposite of silence is a shockwave
Jasbir K. Puar analyses in The Right to Maim how the production of most of the world’s disability happens through colonial violence, developmentalism, the disparity of resources, war, and genocide. For my project at Bulegoa z/b, I will collaborate with Spanish-Brazilian researcher Júlia Ayerbe, whose work focuses on dissident corporalities, accessibility, and publishing practices, to examine the EU border paradigm – the externalization of the European border and its disablement/debilitation of non-EU citizens – through this framework.

Informed by Crip Theory and Queer Theory and following the principles of Disability Justice, a movement founded by queer, disabled artists and activists of color in response to exclusion from mainstream disability rights and ableism in activist spaces, my collaboration with Júlia Ayerbe seeks to reframe accessibility not as an afterthought of institutional obligation but as a speculative, fluid practice – interrogating cultural, political, and historical infrastructures that determine whose bodies, knowledges, and futures are deemed viable.

Saverio Cantoni (b. 1985, IT) is a white-passing, disabled – oral Deaf – artist based in Berlin. Working across media, their practice treats making as material knowledge: approaching sound, pigments, and custom devices as living carriers of memory and resistance, in an ongoing exploration of an “aesthetics of access” and its potential for non-normative world-making. Saverio’s solo and collaborative work – as a member of the Sickness Affinity Group (SAG) and as an activist across different alliances – aims to destabilize power structures and rethink normative understandings of sensorial experiences.

*The opposite of silence is a shockwave is commissioned by Bulegoa z/b as part of access: practices and habits, a long-term project in collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and Askeaton Contemporary Arts (Askeaton, Ireland), in which we aim to develop accessibility as a creative practice at the heart of our work as arts organisations. Access: practices and habits is co-funded by the European Union.

practicesandhabits.org

Image description

Three large textiles float in a darkened room, inscribed with curved, luminescent text that forms a glowing diagram under UV light. Words such as “dislocate,” “sonic imagination,” “care,” “aural,” “amplify,” and “agency” are linked by circular and branching lines. Smaller sound-related terms—“echo,” “reverb,” “hush,” “pulse,” and “tremor”—are scattered along the curves. The installation reads as a radiant map of sonic and political concepts unfolding across the panels.