The aim of the exhibition is to showcase the wealth and diversity of the Mediterranean area through a study of the voice, one of the most important aspects of Humanity's intangible heritage, as an element of communication among the peoples of the Mare Nostrum, and to champion a renewed meeting place for the different human voices which today live side-by-side within the region.
Each culture has many voices, and each individual many forms of articulation, speech and song. Around the coasts and islands of the Western Mediterranean, voices resonate with a host of vocal examples which serve to build up each situation, each moment of daily life or shared emotion. The borderlines of expression are difficult to trace. Beyond languages and accents, the way we speak, sing, scream or cry represent a continuous spectrum of acoustic shades. Variations in sound are striking, but in any corner, however distant it may be, we will always encounter a recollection of familiar voices.
The languages spoken throughout the extent of the coastlines and islands of the Western Mediterranean belong to two unique linguistic families: Afro-Asiatic (Arabic and Amazigh) and Indo-European (Spanish, Catalan, Corsican, French, Italian, Occitan and Sardinian). Over the last few centuries this set of languages has built up major spaces for communal communication, although they have also blended with many others since ancient times, such as Hebrew, Albanian and Romanian, and more recently Chinese, Olof or Tagalog.
Over the centuries the languages spoken around the lands of the Western Mediterranean have exchanged gestures and intonations, phonemes and words, while sung forms have adopted timbres and melodies.
This exhibition invites us on a startling journey around the thousand and one voices of the Mediterranean. The audiovisual recordings give form to voices through gestures and faces. The audiovisual archives which make up the exhibition are the fruit of recent unprecedented and painstaking fieldwork conducted between August 2008 and October 2009 by the exhibition curators, to be enjoyed by visitors in all their power thanks to a high-definition format.
