FIELD GUIDE FOR SOUND TRAVEL

upcoming

Oct 23

Daniela Cinel

January 16 to May 8, 2027
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery

In her new project, Field Guide for Sound Travel, Daniela Cinel has created a video installation of a soundwalk that maps the sounds of her childhood. The video follows Cinel as she revisits the site of her family home where her Italian immigrant parents lived in 1963, and the lumber mill, where her father worked at night, both located along the railroad tracks near the former site of the Red Bridge in Kamloops. Through what she calls “sound as a form of time travel,” Cinel captures the auditory feeling of a past time and place that represents her earliest experience growing up in Kamloops.

Donning a copper piano string belt, leather boots, and a wooden headset, Cinel slowly and intentionally walks the railway in two directions, alluding to connections between childhood and adulthood, and her parents’ experience as immigrants moving between Italy and Kamloops. Cinel’s material choices draw on her deep connection to the piano, an instrument she has played since childhood, and also point to materials that are transported along the metal corridor of the railway, and the shoemaking trade her father learned in his home province of Treviso and continued to practice at his shop in downtown Kamloops. To create the wooden headset, Cinel used a process of wood bending that assists in forming pianos and other classical musical instruments. The headset functions counter to modern noise-cancelling headphones; the earpiece funnels environmental sounds into the artist’s field of hearing, allowing her to absorb a fuller sense of the surrounding area. The sound of the railway has been a constant noise Cinel had taken in throughout her life, and a sound that constitutes the auditory landscape of Kamloops. More broadly, the railway represents the diasporic movement of immigrants, like her family, who came to Canada from Italy.

A professional pianist and member of the Kamloops Symphony Orchestra, Cinel composed the audio accompanying the video along the principles of ricercare, a Renaissance instrumental form that seeks to find meaning through the imitation of melodies. Cinel fuses sound fragments of field recordings from downtown Kamloops, her own piano riffs, and cassette recordings from a childhood trip to Italy to form a sonic palimpsest — a sound collage with many layers —providing a polyphonic texture for her soundwalk.

Graphic scores displayed on music stands document the environmental sounds from Cinel’s walk and her auditory observations along the way. Traffic from the Red Bridge, the cadence of family conversations and songs in Italian, a chorus of train horns, and hammering sounds are interpreted as graphic symbols that record the types of sounds and pacing. Together, they invite possibilities for expanded listening that can be otherwise overlooked when heard in the chaotic listening of real time.

Bringing together video, sound, sculptural forms, and graphic scores, Cinel captures a feeling of her early life in Kamloops and trips to Italy and reflects on a changing cityscape where the original structures from her childhood — the family home, her father’s workplace, and the Red Bridge, which was destroyed by fire in 2024 — have been physically erased but still carry the residue of memory.