Lisa Rae Bartolomei is a composer and sound artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work explores the boundaries between acoustic and electronic sound, often using transformation as both method and metaphor — taking a source material and pulling it so far from its origins that something entirely new emerges in its place.

For Flow, she worked on Segment 6 of the River Lech — the hanging bridge at Forchach, a stunning suspension structure that arches over the most braided and dynamic stretch of the entire river, in the heart of the Naturpark Tiroler Lech. People walk across it, and occasionally cycle despite the prohibition, and their passage makes the steel cables vibrate like the strings of a giant instrument.

That image — a bridge as instrument, a crossing as sound — became Lisa’s entry point. Living on the other side of the world, she allowed the River Lech to exist for her as something between a landscape and an abstraction, a place known only through recordings and images. The bridge felt like a liminal space, neither here nor there, suspended between worlds the way the river itself hangs between its alpine origins and its eventual dissolution into the Danube. She used Omnisphere to play the bridge cables like a piano, building a composition in which every sound traces back to the original field recording — transformed, stretched, processed beyond recognition, yet rooted in the same source. The water, she says, is mysteriously absent. Just outside the frame of the piece. Always there, never heard.

Flow is a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).