I am Martina Raponi, an Italian artist and researcher based in Rotterdam, NL.

I have been investigating noise since 2012, and I am currently exploring the territories of the unheard.

My interest in noise comes from my father's Deafness. When I was a kid, my dad would lay his head against my back, asking me to speak out loud so he could "learn" my voice through the vibrations of my rib cage. 

This vibratory and tactile quality of noise as an aesthetic relational object has been my very first fascination. With this, I entered a world of noise through a world of "silence": my father's.

However, deafness is not a "silent" mode of existence, and this is the reason why, when looked at from a systemic, societal, cultural, linguistic, and political perspective, it becomes an epitome of what I recognize as—and value in—"noise".

My father's Deafness, and my own position as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults, a cross/inter-cultural identity that characterizes my world view), helped me develop an inclination for objects of research which are complex, ramified, layered, irreducible to definitions through binary oppositions, and which always require an infrastructural and contextual analysis. 

Noise embodies all of these characteristics which I find also—and often contradictorily—in myself , and to which I am attracted as a writer, researcher, and artist.

My first research outcome was a book published by Auditorium, in Italy, in 2015, titled "Strategie del Rumore: Interferenze tra Arte, Filosofia e Underground". (It hasn't been translated into English yet. Will it ever? Time will tell)

My interest in noise throughout the years shifted from an underground-music-oriented perspective to a more systemic, societal, and political understanding of the topic. I look for noise inside complexity, and I recognize complexity as an aesthetic value.

After the publication of the book, my research developed into more investigative projects which take the form of public participatory events, performative reading and writing, voice experimentations, sound production, installations, explorations of popular forms of consuming media, and academic engagement.

One of my ongoing projects is noiserr. noiserr also became an entity in which I recognize myself as an expanded being and brain, in constant flux and (ex)change with others.

I co-founded with artist [M] Dudeck the Ansible Institute, a transitory speculative fiction research laboratory.

With Sonia de Jager, Cécile Malaspina, Mattin, Miguel Prado, and Inigo Wilkins, I founded the NRU (Noise Research Union), active in developing participatory strategies in thinking about noise through diagrams.

Since the end of 2023, I started performing with my Theremin (her name is Ursula, together we play thereminoise)—hands down one of the coolest instruments ever invented, affording a way of engaging with sound making that is intimately connected with movement, a central element in my own understanding and experience of noise, sound, and language.

My second book, “Psofotopias. Noise: Sounding Out the Unheard,” will be published by Auditorium at the end of the summer 2025.

I hold a Bachelor in the Humanities from the University of Padova (2007-2011, Italy), a Master in Art Mediation from the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna (2011-2014, Italy), a Master in Fine Arts from the Sandberg Instituut of Amsterdam (2014-2016, Netherlands). 

I am currently employed by the Willem de Kooning Academy as art theory tutor, and I am a PhD candidate at ASCA, University of Amsterdam, researching The Acoustemology of the Unheard.