Terraforma 2019: what to catch at the main avantgarde music and sustainability festival in Italy

Terraforma, international festival of electronic music, artistic experimentation and environmental sustainability produced by Threes, an agency and curatorial project specialized in site-specific concerts in key-places of the Italian cultural heritage, has reached its sixth edition. This year's theme will be language, explored both in terms of expressive form and of plurality of languages, codes and alphabets. As Nathalie Du Pasquier, artist and illustrator who curated this year festival’s artworks, explains “alphabet’s symbols have a variable value and their combination creates different meanings depending on who deciphers them". 

Electronic music defined a new expressive code, imposing itself as a form of art almost always devoid of text.  This year it goes beyond its own genre to open up to geographical, formal and conceptual contaminations. Laurie Anderson, avant-garde composer, performer and visual artist,  will be the most relevant guest with “The Language of the Future”, a mix of narration, electric violin and interactive videos. Another prestigious protagonist will be Mica Levi, composer of the soundtracks of films like "Under the skin", "Jackie" and "Monos". The electro-acoustic musician Caterina Barbieri will give voice to the minimalist language, DJ Stingray to the industrial one and Daniel Higgs to the mystic one thanks to the sound homilies of his “The Fools Sermon ".

Monolake, who developed the Ableton Live software, and Renick Bell, with his music obtained from the union of live coding and mapping, are entrusted with the exploration of algorithmic language, while Walter Prati and Ricciarda Belgiojoso will talk about the cosmic language with a reinterpretation of Tierkreis by Stockhausen. Moving from codes to places, India, North Africa and the Middle East will resonate in Sir Richard Bishop's guitar and in the electro-acoustic show of the Iranian sound artist Sote, with his "Parallel Persia" that has enriched electronics with the warm sounds of santur and tar instruments. Juliana Huxtable, visual artist, performer and writer, will address the themes of gender, beauty and identity with her gender fluid work.

Terraforma was awarded by the English non-profit association A Greener Festival thanks to its measures to safeguard green areas, reduce waste, monitor water and energy consumption. A new futuristic structure, totally self-sufficient thanks to the use of photovoltaic panels, was built: Kiosque à Musique. Its stage, designed by young Italian and Belgian architects and carpenters, is designed to amplify the sounds of nature through echo chambers. The festival's architectural park, renovated in 2018 under the guidance of architects Matteo Petrucci and Sofia Coutsoucos, includes Japanese-inspired "Martian" furnishings designed by the AOUMM studio with a team of students from the Politecnico di Milano. Among concerts and "alphabetic waterfalls" - a review of readings and stories on language - there will also be talks including one with Stefano Mancuso, a plant neurobiologist inserted by the New Yorker among the most influential World Changers.