Are you listening?

The Why

Andrea Valvini — December 2025

I’m leaving for Taiwan in early February 2026.

Three months at the port of Kaohsiung, listening to how life resonates day and night in this place of perpetual repetition. This is a return — fourteen years after leaving the art world.

In 2011, three collapses happened simultaneously: Fukushima, the Greek debt crisis, a betrayal in Taiwan. I found no answer to the question: what’s the point of promoting values through art while the world falls apart? So I left.
For thirteen years, I imported organic olive oil. Working with small producers taught me something essential: the repeated gesture doesn’t repeat mindlessly. The producer harvesting olives for the twentieth year refines, senses, adjusts. But if they stop, their sensitivity withers — not because it’s useless, but because maintaining it without practice costs too much energy. Like a muscle that atrophies.
Forty years of martial arts taught me the same truth bodily. Ground judo is tactile listening — perceiving tensions, breaths, intentions before they manifest. A gesture repeated ten thousand times becomes sensitivity. Currently in repair after injuries, I feel my own body losing this muscle of attention.
This is what I want to explore in Kaohsiung.
The docker attaching a container for the thousandth time isn’t a machine. Their gesture has evolved. They know what cable tension announces failure, what crane sound signals a problem. The street vendor preparing the same dish for twenty years hears when the oil is ready, sees when the dough has the right texture.
My central question: what does the repeated gesture reveal about the sound we no longer hear?
2011 taught me you can’t continue as if nothing happened. 2025 teaches me that people continue anyway — and that’s where we must listen.
Not a documentary. Not sociological analysis. Attentive listening transformed into sonic creation.

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