Cucina Povera

Cucina Povera is the solo project of Karelian-Luxembourgish academic and composer Maria Rossi, focusing on the marginal and the observational. Looped and rehearsed motifs in their work are an uncanny testament to the beauty of banality, infused with the mysticism of everyday life and a love for accessible sound sources like creaky tenement floors, boiling kettles and leaky taps – stories told by means of rudimentary synthesis of voice and field recording. Like in the titular practice of peasant cooking, Rossi takes simple ingredients and makes a stylistically resourceful, spontaneous hermeticism that primarily makes for a creative respite from the hubbub of the metropole. Cucina Povera is an act of gleaning to create gauzy layers of vocals, highlighting the spectral and artefactual ways of parasitic and composite sound. The project highlights tensions amongst architectural space, geographic place, cultural and linguistic identity and sonics through loosely organised and aesthetic sound