Exhibiting the voice. Displays of the invisible

Starting from Adriana Caverero’s theory of the voice and Mladen Dolar’s book A Voice and Nothing More, this paper aims to examine how the museum can exhibit the voice and its always acousmatic physicality, an invisible yet profoundly corporeal element. Furthermore, by analyzing some significant exhibitions that have made the voice and, more broadly, sound the cornerstone of their proposal (Voices curated by Christopher Phillips in 1998, The body of voice. Carmelo Bene, Cathy Berberian, Demetrio Stratos held in Rome in 2019, and the exhibition I suoni del mondo at the Castello di Rivoli, 2024), the essay seeks to prove how the museum, which has always been a privileged scopic device, through the exhibition of the sound and, above all, of the vocalic element, can take on a new capacity to construct and exhibit knowledge, overcoming the “high esteem for the sphere of vision” (Cavarero, 2005)