Lingue che Mancano (Missing Languages) is an ongoing artistic research project by the duo 1212, formed by flutist Albane Tamagna and clarinettist Vittoria Ecclesia. It explores the intersections of linguistic memory, personal heritage, and contemporary instrumental practice through a shared experience of missing languages and floating homelands.
The project grows out of a common condition: both artists grew up surrounded by regional languages—Corsican and the Verbano dialect—without fully acquiring them. They later moved away and became part of expatriate communities in different countries, constantly rebuilding and reinventing their sense of identity. Through Lingue che Mancano, they engage with this shared ground of absence: redefining what “home” means and what “home” sounds like. The work asks: how can musical practice become a space where imagination reactivates what seems lost? How can the mixture of absence, embodied sonic memory, and lived displacement turn into a form of knowing and creation?
Drawing on autoethnography as a methodological frame, the duo negotiates shared and divergent histories, mediating between contemporary musical languages and regional traditions. Field recordings, folk song archives, oral history interviews with dialect speakers, and the performers’ own memories serve as raw material. From these, hybrid sonic spaces emerge: instrumental timbre fused with vocal inflections, traditional melodic fragments in dialogue with contemporary techniques, and structured improvisation. The project ultimately aims to develop a method of creation rooted in language and memory that other artists can adapt to explore and perform their own cultural roots.
Rather than romanticising cultural retrieval, Lingue che Mancano proposes music as a generative threshold space where tradition and innovation are not opposed, but mutually constitutive. The research situates itself within current discourse on practice‑based inquiry as a way of addressing questions that exceed conventional academic frames.
The project has already been presented in Vienna, Linz, and Darmstadt, and has been selected for EPARM 2026 in Oslo.
Duration : 50 minutes
Format : Performance for flutes, pivana, clarinets, electronics and testimonies
Performers : 2 musicians
Booking fee : 1.200 €
La Compagnie du Chant des Baleines 