Cantilenano le onde
Alice Pontiggia
Cantilenano le onde is produced with the support of Lucia Award 2021.
Cantilenano le onde is a radio work that has grown out of some conversations between Houda Latrech and Alice Pontiggia, which took place on the shores of some of the seas, rivers, lakes and streams that are part of their stories and have inevitably flowed through both of them. What memories do their drops carry? A flow of words that will lead them to discuss the construction of their identities, the ties they have with the geographies they were born and grew up in, and the emotions that arise from all this. This dialogue was inspired by an excerpt from Scegliere, Houda’s diary, published in Il confine tra noi. Storie migranti, an anthology of short stories submitted to DiMMi – Diari Multimediali Migranti, a project of the National Diary Archive Foundation of Pieve Santo Stefano.
Alice Pontiggia is an architect, artist and researcher from Valtellina, Italy. She is currently working on the processes of creating cosmologies, the eco-technical-symbolic relationships between human and land, alternative futures for architecture and the role of body memories in the definition of identity. Her project The Act of Recosmizing, supported by the Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies community at the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm, explores the geographies of lower Valtellina. Her investigations, which originate in spatial disciplines, philosophy and field work, are presented through writing, architecture, film, psychophysical practices and sound. She has worked as an architect, collaboratively and independently, in Mexico and Italy, where she currently practices as a freelancer. She holds an M.Arch. from Politecnico di Milano and 同济大学 Tongji University, and a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Architecture. She trained as a musician for fourteen years.
Houda Latrech was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1998. In 2002, along with part of her family, she joined her father in Italy. She lives in Travedona Monate and graduated from the Faculty of Law at the State University of Milan in April 2022. She is currently a practicing lawyer in a law firm and is part of the Italian Network of Leaders for Inclusion and Vision Aps. In 2018 she was among the finalists of the Chiara Giovani literary prize, and in 2019 among the winners of the DiMMi – Diari Multimediali Migranti – competition.