Demystifying the COVID-19 Hyperobject in Marco Fusinato’s Desastres

This paper aims to provide a theoretical articulation of Marco Fusinato’s major noise performance project Desastres (2022) vis-à-vis the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the definitive hyperobjects of our milieu. Fusinato’s project can be approached as a primary example of recent trends in contemporary art that mobilise noise and uncertainty through sound and performance in light of polycrisis exacerbated by the pandemic – what I refer to as “post-COVID noise art.” This paper applies contemporary noise theory by Cecile Malaspina and Mattin to contemporary noise practice to address two divergent functions of Desastres that are at once constructive and destructive: amplification and compression. The first concerns the project’s amplification of the disastrous experience of the pandemic (itself a virulent form of noise) on several fronts; technically, in its impenetrable system’ logic, contagion, feedback and indiscernibility between signal and noise; culturally, in it’s occupation within a post-COVID context that operated as a central conceptual premise behind the work; and socially, in its propensity to alienate audiences. The second responds to Fusinato and post-COVID noise art’s proclivity to use compression as a tool to reduce the difference between signal and noise, evidencing “the new normal” of noisy life after the pandemic. Finally, to wrestle hyperobjects from their roots in object-oriented ontology, it will be argued that the unfathomable noise of Desastres, a reflection of the alterity inherent to the pandemic experience, directly interfaces with intrapersonal subjectivity and liberal selfhood, making such noisy objects a deeply human affair.