Sacred Space is an experimental performance at the intersection of ritual, electronic sound art, and embodied vocal practice. It explores the shadowed relationship between the sacred and the feminine through a fusion of voice, live electronics and visuals.
Created and performed by Jolanda Moletta, the work unfolds through four elemental archetypes - the Shaman, the Sibyl, the Mystic, and the Witch - figures who historically operated at the edges of accepted spiritual power. These are the original outsiders: keepers of hidden knowledge, mediators between worlds, and embodiments of forms of sacredness that dominant cultures have repeatedly exiled, feared, or erased.
The performance investigates how the feminine communicates with the invisible through Nature as medium: cycles of decay and renewal, geological resonance, breath, fire, water, and subterranean spaces. Instead of narrative, Sacred Space relies on the body as instrument and memory-holder, drawing on ancestral intuition that predates language.
The work combines raw, extended vocal techniques with electronics and live sound processing.
The sound world is dark, immersive, and textural: sustained tones and elemental breaths processed through live electronics, feedback, distortion, and low-frequency resonance, shifting layers that blur ritual intensity with contemporary experimental aesthetics.
Sacred Space constructs a sensory environment rather than a stage. Light, shadow, and minimal visual cues evoke the mythic terrains these archetypes once inhabited: caves, stone chambers, subterranean sanctuaries, solitary cells. The audience is invited into a liminal zone where time folds and ancient memory becomes palpable through sound.
At its core, the performance traces a historical tension: women welcomed into sacred spaces only under control, or forced into secrecy, danger, or solitude when practicing their own forms of spiritual connection. Sacred Space exposes this duality, communion versus exclusion, revelation versus erasure.
The piece unfolds as a descent: part ritual, part electronic performance, part psychic excavation. Rather than observing, the audience is invited to feel, rather than interpret, to remember.
Sacred Space is an immersive, transformative experience that merges contemporary experimental electronics with archaic ritual memory: a sanctuary built from sound, where forgotten feminine lineages rise through voice, body, and technology.
SACRED SPACE +
Sacred Space + is a new incarnation of Sacred Space, developed following Jolanda’s meeting with Irene Fortunato at the 2024 edition of the Italian festival Seeyousound/Frequencies, and marked by the introduction of custom wearable controllers. These bespoke wearable interfaces transform gesture into sound manipulation, allowing the performer’s movements, breath, and ritual actions to dynamically modulate the sonic environment. The result is a system in which body, voice, and electronics converge into a single performative organism.
Irene Fortunato contributes to the programming of the sound systems for the controllers and supports the development of ambisonic spatialization, helping to shape an immersive and dynamic sonic environment.
Sacred Space + constructs a liminal, sensorial environment: a transformative experience in which contemporary experimental electronics and archaic ritual memory merge, bringing forgotten female genealogies to the surface through voice, body, image, and technology.
Artist Statement
Sacred Space was born as a performative research project in which voice, electronics, and sound spatialization create a contemporary sacred space: a threshold between technology and nature, between body and the invisible.
My philosophy comes from an immersive experience in nature and the idea that what we call sacred is inseparable from physis, the generative and primordial principle that precedes all forms. The project recognizes how the same paradigm that has reduced nature to a resource has historically marginalized the feminine and its knowledge. In this sense, I resonate with the words of Marija Gimbutas: “I reject the assumption that civilization refers only to androcratic warrior societies. The generative basis of any civilization lies in its degree of artistic creation, aesthetic achievements, nonmaterial values, and freedom which make life meaningful and enjoyable for all its citizens, as well as a balance of powers between the sexes.”
The ritual dimension is central: a ritual is a set of actions and gestures, repeated and seemingly illogical, yet charged with intention, which transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Humans have always created meaning through singing, dancing, ceremonial architecture, and symbolic gestures. As anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas notes, ritual, for its connection with symbol, rhythm, and movement, is intimately linked to the evolution of art: it introduces structure into uncertainty, reduces anxiety, and anchors attention in the present. In Sacred Space +, repeated gestures, wordless vocality, and spatialization become ritual acts that generate meaning beyond their technical function.
Through four archetypes, shaman, sibyl, mystic, and witch, I give voice to figures who have historically been custodians of intuitive and embodied knowledge, often persecuted or rendered invisible. The singing, devoid of semantic language, evokes a shared archaic memory. A system of wearable controllers transforms gesture into sound: the voice, processed in real time with electronics and gestural control, generates complex layers and hybrid forms between music and movement, dissolving the boundary between natural and digital.
Technology thus becomes a sensitive organism, responding to the body and amplifying embodied intelligence. Spatialization becomes dramaturgy of space: sound breathes, envelops, and constructs a liminal environment. Sacred Space + combines technological experimentation, critical thought, and ecological ethics, envisioning the machine not as a tool of domination but as a sensitive extension of the body, the voice, and a civilization founded on balance, relationality, and attentive listening.
Jolanda Moletta
Photo © Giorgio Violino
Photo © Giorgio Violino
Photo © Giorgio Violino
Photo © Giorgio Violino