Annalisa Pellino
Annalisa Pellino is a lecturer and postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Communication, Arts, and Media at IULM University in Milan, where she earned her PhD in Visual & Media Studies in 2022.
Building on her doctoral research, she published The Voice in Transition: Cinema, Contemporary Art, and Audiovisual Culture (Mimesis, 2023), alongside several essays and articles in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and online cultural magazines. She also serves on the editorial board of Cinéma&Cie: Film and Media Studies Journal.
Her research centers on audiovisual culture and media studies, with particular interests in film sound and voice, media archaeology, contemporary art, videographic criticism, and film circulation and exhibition. In 2025, she received the Italian Council grant for art research to support her project on the Aural Impulse in Contemporary Visual Arts.
She is a co-founder of AWI – Art Workers Italia, an organization advocating for the rights of art workers and ensuring their voices are heard—even when they’re just whispering.
Building on her doctoral research, she published The Voice in Transition: Cinema, Contemporary Art, and Audiovisual Culture (Mimesis, 2023), alongside several essays and articles in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and online cultural magazines. She also serves on the editorial board of Cinéma&Cie: Film and Media Studies Journal.
Her research centers on audiovisual culture and media studies, with particular interests in film sound and voice, media archaeology, contemporary art, videographic criticism, and film circulation and exhibition. In 2025, she received the Italian Council grant for art research to support her project on the Aural Impulse in Contemporary Visual Arts.
She is a co-founder of AWI – Art Workers Italia, an organization advocating for the rights of art workers and ensuring their voices are heard—even when they’re just whispering.
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Books by Annalisa Pellino
Call for Papers by Annalisa Pellino
Surveillance and Control in Italian Audiovisual Culture
Organised by Luisella Farinotti, Annalisa Pellino, and Federico Selvini
October 30–31, 2025 – IULM University, Milan
This conference proposes to fill this gap by investigating how surveillance has been
represented, mediated, and contested across the landscape of Italian audiovisual culture. We
welcome proposals from scholars and researchers—including, where appropriate, in the form
of video and audio essays—that engage with, but are not limited to, the following research
areas:
- Narratives and representations of surveillance in Italian audiovisual culture.
- The staging and evolution of surveillance techniques, technologies, and devices.
- Re-readings of authors, genres, media forms, and stylistic modes through the lens of
surveillance studies.
- Iconographies and phonographies of surveillance within the Italian context.
- Media archaeologies of surveillance in Italy.
- Theories, methodologies, and analytical tools for examining the relationship between
surveillance, media culture, and audiovisual forms.
- Intersections between surveillance, media, and cultural practices (including habits,
customs, and consumption).
- Surveillance, sousveillance, and counter-surveillance within the Italian media system and
its transformations.
- Representations and practices of public and private control within media infrastructures.
- The role of media in the normalisation of public policy and in shaping practices of
control and surveillance.
Papers by Annalisa Pellino
the 2019 Venice Art Biennale, is an African-American artist and filmmaker, who has contributed to the global affirmation of a black audiovisual
aesthetic based on the body and its sonic extensions. In particular, the artist
identifies the specificity of black culture in what he defines as Black Visual
Intonation, by constructing the audiovisual phrasing on the temporality
of Afro-American music, which configures new possibilities for a black
aesthetics based on the sounding body. Starting from these premises, the
essay analyzes Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), which
intersects the modes of the essay film with those of music video, where the
black visual intonation works as a kinesthetic principle of emotional revival
that supports the audio-tactile continuity (Iannotta, 2017) between the film
and the spectator’s body.
di Chantal Akerman, dove la voce è al centro di un ripensamento radicale
del rapporto tra visivo e sonoro, o del cosiddetto «contratto audiovisivo» (Chion 1992) e ne dichiara i processi di costruzione. La cineasta sperimenta con le possibilità formali, concettuali e performative dello spazio espositivo, e usa la voce per fare i conti con la questione dei limiti dello sguardo, che connota tutta la sua produzione. Attraverso un’oscillazione costante tra figurazione e astrazione, che mette in tensione il senso per rivoltare ogni cosa nel suo rovescio – una strategia già presente nei suoi film sotto forma di istanza antinarrativa (Bruno 2019) – Akerman valorizza la materialità della voce e sfuma il confine tra il semantico e il vocalico, immagine e phoné.
Muovendo da un approccio che pensa il cinema come un “performance-oriented medium” (Altman 1992) all’interno di uno scenario
post-cinematico (De Rosa, Hediger 2016; Chateau, Moure 2020) e l’evento filmico come una mise-en-scène di corpi, l’analisi si concentra sulla voce mediatizzata (Lombardi Vallauri, Rizzuti 2019), che si colloca in un terzo spazio tra performativo e narrativo, embodiment e disembodiment.
Translations by Annalisa Pellino
Una ricerca sulla cultura dei media, sulle temporalità degli oggetti mediali e sull'obsolescenza programmata in piena crisi ecologica e all'interno di una società che produce una gran quantità di rifiuti elettronici. Gli autori affrontano l’argomento collocandolo sotto il cappello dell’archeologia dei media, e ambiscono a fare di questo ramo della teoria dei media di orientamento storiografico una metodologia utile per la pratica artistica contemporanea. Così, l’archeologia dei media diventa non solo un metodo di scavo di discorsi mediali rimossi o dimenticati, ma si prolunga in un metodo artistico prossimo a quello della cultura Do-It-Yourself (DIY), del circuit bending, dell’hardware hacking, e di altre pratiche hacktiviste strettamente correlate all’economia politica della tecnologia dell’informazione. I dead media, infine, vengono qui interpretati come "zombie media" – ovvero media morti rivitalizzati e riportati all’uso dopo essere stati modificati.
Conference Presentations by Annalisa Pellino
Tuttavia, a partire dagli anni Ottanta, la FFT si apre a prospettive più ampie che spostano l’attenzione sulla voce e sulla costruzione del regime sonoro, oltre i confini di Hollywood. Queste tengono conto non solo della capacità dei soggetti di mobilitare il proprio punto di vista, attivando dei meccanismi di identificazione imprevisti e in grado di sovvertire il paradigma oculocentrico basato sulla centralità del male gaze, ma anche di attingere ad altre sfere sensoriali, parimenti responsabili della produzione della soggettività e della rappresentazione normativa del corpo. Beyond the Gaze per citare il titolo di un numero speciale della rivista “Signs” uscito nel 2004 a cura di Kathleen McHugh e Vivian Sobchack, sintomatico del nuovo indirizzo della FFT.
Date queste premesse, l’intervento si concentra sullo spostamento di interesse dallo sguardo all’ascolto, offrendo una panoramica delle principali teorie sul rapporto tra voce e genere: la proposta topologica di Mary Ann Doane; l’approccio psicoanalitico di Kaja Silverman; l’idea di vortice narrativo di Britta Sjogren; la figura delle mismatched women di Jennifer Fleeger; l’ideologia che presiede alle tecniche di registrazione e riproduzione della voce messa in luce da Amy Lawrence nei film degli anni Quaranta; i concetti di phonogénie e vocal personas.
In Kasiterit, Rizaldi explores the socio-political landscape of Indonesia, where the mining of tin – fundamental for digital and AI-based technologies – is a material and symbolic driver of exploitation and environmental crisis. As a way to avoid censorship and reflect on the broader implications of resource extraction in postcolonial contexts, the artist uses an essayistic form, blending documentary mode and speculative fiction, and drawing on Indonesian mythology and animist culture that consider tin as a deity.
Similarly, Tellurian Drama presents a poignant exploration of identity and belonging amidst the backdrop of environmental crises, by appealing to the invisible power of indigenous ancestral knowledge. Focusing on the history and actuality of Radio Malabar – a former radio station opened in 1923 by the Dutch East Indies, and now a tourist attraction – Rizaldi reflects on the vital role of the mountain as a colonial ruin and an apparatus for geoengineering technology. The narrative is based on a text written by Dr. Munarwan, a pseudo-anthropologist, amateur historian and science fiction writer, who in his “Reconfiguring the Earth: Radio Malabar as a Geo-engineering Imagination” (1986), imagined that radio waves can be used to intensify the growth of flora.
In light of this, the presentation analyses the aesthetic and narrative strategies used by Rizaldi to explore hypothetical scenarios and alternative realities while maintaining a connection to real-world issues or events, which serve as a tool for articulating conflicts and amplifying marginalised perspectives.
A wide range of vocal strategies – namely acousmatic voices or sonic close-ups, shouting and singing voices, vocal mimicries and non-semantic phonation, and all sorts of inarticulate sounds (breath, hums, whispers…) – are symptoms of an emotional “impairment” and of different “degrees of muteness” (Sterne 2021), an uncertain limbo between childhood and adulthood, sometimes marked by gender-bender strategies.
In particular, the video-essay explores the somatic occurrences of the voice, outlining a radical phenomenology where humanity and animality converge in the same expression, opening a space of visibility – or in this case we should say audibility – for those subjectivities that Deleuze and Guattari (1975, 1980) consider as “minor subjectivities”. According to the philosophers they manifest themselves as "pure sound material" and "pure intensity" of animality, able to disarticulate language and social stereotypes.