SEVEN METAL SHEETS (2024) emerged from researching the scold's bridle: a metal contraption originating in Europe in the late Middle Ages that was designed to muzzle assertive and opinionated women. Different bridles were constructed with different gags: some pressed down the tongue to inhibit speech, while others incorporated sharp edges or spikes to inflict injury when attempting to speak. Like many other tools of discipline, oppression, and violence, the practice of bridling human bodies was brought by Europeans to other parts of the world. In the Americas, white plantation owners used a similar object, usually referred to as “the mask of speechlessness,” to subjugate, exploit, and control enslaved Africans.

The installation serves as both an experiment with a scold’s bridle replica and as a commemoration of the voices, ideas, wisdoms, inner worlds, and never-uttered jokes of those silenced throughout history. To create the replica, Luca collaborated with a local blacksmith employing traditional, pre-industrial methods. They then taped a contact microphone to it whose signals were fed into a speaker and played back toward the bridle. The feedback that emerged caused it to vibrate and hum. Within the installation, recordings of this feedback are played back into sheets of steel, forged of the same material as the bridle replica.

Materials: sheets of steel corroded with spit and vomit, transducers, various contact microphone sound recordings from a scold’s bridle.