Alessandro Bosetti discovers that, as a young man, his grandfather Aldo lived in Buenos Aires.
In the very early years of the twentieth century, Aldo, his brother Fulvio, and his sister Lidia lived in an apartment in the San Telmo neighborhood. The address is Defensa 1111. Alessandro Bosetti rents a room in the same building, determined to send a message to his grandfather, who has been dead for decades.

The message is mainly composed of questions—requests for advice that a middle-aged man asks of a young man who lived long ago in the same building where he now finds himself.
The message is transmitted using the metal framework of the building as an antenna. It is injected into the floors and beams as sound vibrations. It is broadcast throughout the neighborhood by a car equipped with loudspeakers (“coche parlante”) rented for the occasion.
The questions are the same ones that Alessandro Bosetti asks the people around him in Buenos Aires or those who today live in the same building where Aldo once lived.

At a certain point, Alessandro Bosetti leaves Buenos Aires for a couple of days to travel to a tiny village in the Argentine Pampas where his grandfather’s family took their first steps in the country. There, too, he spreads the message and records everything that might contain an answer.
Then he returns to San Telmo and continues to live at Defensa 1111 for a while longer.

The grandfather does not appear in the usual ways—no menacing presence sitting on the edge of the bed at night, no hidden voice in the folds of a noise—none of that. He is not a ghost trapped within the walls of Defensa 1111.
Yet his light presence is everywhere, like a flavor, a color, a kind of grave and seductive elegance.

Once the message to Aldo has been sent, Alessandro Bosetti leaves the building without looking back, hurriedly loads his car, and drives off—as if departing for an ordinary trip—while knowing he will never again live within the old walls of Defensa 1111.

Defensa 1111 is built entirely from recordings made within the building itself, in the surrounding streets of the San Telmo neighborhood, and in the village of Alicia, in the province of Córdoba, where part of the family story continued. It is not a narrative, not a family memoir, but the diary of a listening.

The piece is punctuated by increasingly open questions that Alessandro Bosetti addresses to his grandfather (“I need to talk to abuelo,” proclaims the loudspeaker car in the neighborhood), as he tries to bring forth a young man whose existence he had never suspected, having only known him in his old age, clouded by illness. The responses—ever more open and welcoming—emerge from the landscape, from the spaces of the house on Defensa, often invaded by the constant sonic pollution of tourist tangos blaring from nearby Plaza Dorrego, from the streets of San Telmo, from the night in the village of Alicia. They take shape as fragments, clues, hints, shadows.

The dead grandfather speaks through a dog barking in the stairwell, through the voice of an old man teaching his grandson how to play bocce, through the electromagnetic interferences running along the metal structure of the building, through the voices of its current tenants who know nothing of that earlier time yet inhabit the same walls—and through a thousand other sounds captured inside and around Defensa 1111.

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