When did Terraforma come into being?
The festival was born in 2014, so it’s almost 10 years, this will be the eighth edition considering the covid years, and like so many projects it was born from consciousness, in that sense there was so much desire to create a music festival with a specific idea. We started with two friends, there were many good intentions, but there was no real business idea, which instead came slowly. Terraforma was born with a strong component related to sustainability, not only environmental, but also human, social and economic. The idea was to develop a project with a strong conceptual slant, which today coincides with the existence of Threes Productions, the cultural enterprise behind it. We wanted to structure ourselves and create a team that would support the festival and all the projects that take on its different languages; there is a strong focus on soil, music and sustainability that is traced through all our initiatives.
You have created a festival that does a lot of numbers, is growing and approaches art holistically and its many expressions. Each year you choose to give a different theme to the content of Terraforma, could you give me a preview of this year’s idea?
The central idea remains that of “Terra-forming,” Terra being the Italian word for Earth. The festival was born with the idea of creating a place of encounter and fruition, a platform to bring together different emerging artists and connect them with an equally diverse audience. We want to broaden the niche of experimental music and bring it to a wider public, to create a new scenario where artists and audiences can meet in a contemporary context. On the other hand, there was also the need to create an event that would be regenerative of a space, the terraforming in this case is linked to Villa Conati, one of the many places in Italy that belongs to the community, as a historical monument, and that was a bit lost-in-translation, abandoned in search of a contemporary re-interpretation. There we developed and brought our cultural content, trying to regenerate the place with some reclamation work on the historical park.
Then there are nuances. In this edition we have been inspired by another element, which is the Organic Music Society; an experience that was born in the 1970s’ when Don Cherry, one of the leading exponents of jazz music at the time, left NYC to move to Sweden, where he met Mocki Cherry, a visual artist with whom he founded a space in which I see a lot of Terraforma. It takes up the same idea of taking music out of its conventional spaces, creating a communal space where we bring together arts and music from around the world through experimentation. Our intention is to bring art and life into a total dimension of living, this through music itself.
At the time, the two artists were invited by the MODERNA MUSEET in Stockholm to relocate their famous commune inside a geodesic dome, where they lived for a few months, realizing workshops, installations, concerts and music exhibition for the museum visitors. This is what we would like to repurpose in this edition of Terraforma. We will reconstruct the Dome in collaboration with Matteo Ghidone’s Salottobuono studio in collaboration with the original Dome’s architect Ben Carling. In that space we will be presenting our new book created with Blank Forms. The space will also feature installations, videos and talks on theme. Their story inspired us and we wanted to reinterpret this contents in a contemporary way.