ESP (crossed out)
A project by Benedetta Parisi
sound design by Filippo Conti
dramaturgy assistance, graphic design and installations by Sara Cattin video editing Tommaso Valli
produces by TPE, Festival Colline Torinesi and Cubo Teatro
photos by Andrea Macchia
October 2025, Fondazione Merz, Torino.
ESP (crossed out) is a project that investigates the possibilities of the mind when guided by the ‘blind’ medium of voice and sound, aiming to explore liminal spaces in between bodily sensation and imagination.
The term Extra Sensory Perception refers to all those mental phenomena that allow information to be received without the mediation of the senses, such as telepathy and clairvoyance.
With ESP (crossed out) we want to overturn this definition and create an interactive experience that uses the voice in headphones to guide—through stories, scores, mental visualizations—on a journey of amplification of the imagination, in between the real and the liminal. The research aims first and foremost to experiment with the potential of audio narration, but also to move away from the dictatorship of vision and visual medias.
The work is made of several audio tracks that can adapt to different kinds of space, leading to different trajectories in which people their own individual journey, but also interact with others through encounters and gazes.
Each track addresses a different aspect of perception shitfing:
in the mirror we are guided through observation until we lose perception of our own image;
inside the car of a dead person we are guided to perceive ourselves aging;
in a dark library we are going back to childhood, in between dream and wakefulness;
in complete darkness, we see a place that remains in us with the same intensity of a real memory;
a cinema for one spectator only is where we can listen to a film and find an erotic intimacy.
SET DESIGN AND GRAPHICS
