RESONANT REFUSE

Year: 2026

Type: Audiovisual – Fixed Media

Duration: 07:13

Sound format: Stereo

Audio and video composition: Michele Fondacci

SHORT PREVIEW

Resonant Refuse is an audiovisual work that explores urban waste as a form of material memory and as a system for energy recovery.

Through an immersive composition of sound, image and perceptual transformation, the work presents an ecosystem in which what is discarded does not disappear but continues to produce effects, presence and resonance.

The work stems from the idea that every human gesture leaves a trace and that no action is truly concluded the moment it ends; production, consumption, accumulation and abandonment generate an invisible continuity that permeates objects, spaces and bodies. In this context, waste is neither a passive element nor the final residue of a process, but becomes an active archive capable of recording, retaining and returning energy.

Plastics, metals, glass, packaging and fragments of contemporary consumption are treated as sensitive bodies; their surfaces accumulate tensions, memory and interference that re-emerge as sound frequencies, visual alterations and distortions of perceptual space. Every scrap becomes a persistent presence, a material that continues to act even after being excluded from the cycle of use.

The work imagines places that ceaselessly produce objects, data, noise and waste, and within this environment the boundary between natural landscape, urban infrastructure and material storage gradually dissolves. Abandoned objects are not removed but remain in a state of listening, entering a feedback loop in which every collective action returns in the form of an echo.

It is in this return that the concept of karma emerges, not as a spiritual or moral principle, but as a physical, ecological, acoustic and social phenomenon. Karma is understood here as the permanence of consequence: that which is produced continues to exist beyond its original function; that which is discarded continues to transform the context from which it originates.

Resonant Refuse does not present a narrative that assigns blame, nor does it offer a direct critique of consumerism. Instead, it invites the audience to perceive waste as a form of presence extended across time and space, a material that retains memory and echoes the noise of the society that generated it.