So sìnnoso, fròrese de su sonu (The signs, an anthology of sound) is the title of the project by Zimmerfrei and Gavino Ledda on display at the MAN Museum from 24 October 2014 to 25 January 2015.

The work was inspired by an encounter, in 2006, between the Bologna-based collective and the Sardinian writer, author of the famous novel Padre Padrone (1975). After many years of personal research into the essence of language, thanks to the intervention of Zimmerfrei Ledda has composed a sound landscape in which uttered words take on the consistency of things, resounding in a dark space, like material objects that encounter each other as they move in the darkness. In Gavino Ledda’s vision, the words uttered (stones, mare, water, dew, slaver and ox…) are like colours (colòres), a minimalist ABC book of sinni, the shades of the Sardinian language, which sound brings to life.
The dialectical method of the writer, a shepherd boy who names the visible, thus taking possession of the world and escaping from the laws of the patriarch-father, is intact and still enchanted. The territory explored by Zimmerfrei is made of matter, and sound is the part of matter that can be extracted from things and deposited in other places, without these things changing their nature.

ZimmerFrei was founded in Bologna in 2000 by Anna Rispoli, theatre director and performer, Anna De Manicor, video maker, and sound designer Massimo Carozzi. Through the production of works in various formats (sound settings, video installations, performances, multimedia shows, film documentaries and photography series), the collective studies the countryside, the city and the contemporary social world, from which different images, stories and shades of emotion are identified each time. An exploration of the present closely connected with the idea of “staying”, of time spent observing and living in close contact with a specific place, which highlights the complexities, the dark areas, the layering of time and space, the histories and the symbolic power of places.

Gavino Ledda, born in Siligo in 1938, is a writer, historical linguist and scholar of the Italian language and the Sardinian language. After a childhood spent in the countryside with this father, a shepherd, he freed himself from illiteracy as an adult, graduating in Historical Linguistics from Rome’s "La Sapienza" university. In 1970, he was admitted to the Accademia della Crusca and the following year appointed Romance Studies assistant at the University of Cagliari. He later recounted his own autobiographical experience in the novel Padre padrone. The success of that novel, translated into forty languages, prompted the Taviani Brothers to make it into a film in 1977.

So sìnnoso, fròrese de su sonu is produced in conjunction with Venticinquegradi. At 9 pm on 25 October, at the venue in Via delle Acacie (Cagliari), Zimmerfrei will be presenting “Safari”, a selection and rearrangement in real time of an archive of sound recordings gathered from different parts of the world over the past 10 years.