SPATIAL did not simply bring artists: it summoned rites, visions, presences. Three days in which sound dismantled and rebuilt architectures inside and outside us, forcing us to resonate as a collective body.

The festival opened at the MONOM Studio with the AMP Listening Sessions: Julia Just, Henry Weekes, Ana Rosa and Alireza Toghiyani. First immersions into the tridimensional landscape of 4DSOUND. I closed my eyes and felt sound not as something “out there” but as something cutting through me, sculpting air and flesh. Each traced a unique horizon: intimate threads like caresses, visceral lines hitting the stomach, luminous fragility, dense stratifications. Then Croatian Amor unfolded a layered landscape: waterfalls and sea, organic sounds intertwined with visceral electronics. A deconstructive melancholy, dismantled and recomposed before us, as if memory itself was a material to be reforged.

In Saal 2, the Opening Ceremony by Origin Te Yonton was, for me, absolute liberation. Not music to watch, but vibration to live in, to be dissolved by. I cried, I let myself be carried, feeling my body become part of a collective cleansing. Sonic waves like water washing everything away, vibrations dissolving raw emotions, stripping us back to the essential. It was immense, overwhelming, like being reborn together.

Then NikNak painted a dystopian world: glitch and metallic bass, cold sounds narrating cellular mutations, bodies transitioning into the post-organic. Night turned into ritual with Walter Sallinen, Neko3 and Marta Soggetti: hooded, wielding colossal drums, they generated an hour of ancestral pulse, a spell that transformed the hall into a vibrating circle. To close, Perfect Pitch (Nika Kim, Clarissa Lucattini & Alexey Orlov) with a Butoh performance: a white body, suspended movements, cosmic breath. We were all captured, as if hanging inside time itself.

The installations wove a parallel thread: in Saal 1, the sofas by Paulin Paulin Paulin, with sound contribution by Julija Castellucci, vibrated like instruments to inhabit; in the Sound Chamber, Resonant Studies was conceived as a MONOM Studio project, with contributions from Quantum Gong, Hillary Cox, and Peter Isachenko, opening cosmic landscapes, slow vibrations bridging physics and spirituality. Outside, Edouard Burgeat’s work resonated with the environment, while at the heart of Funkhaus the inflatable installation Naked Space became an organic sculpture where bodies could lie down and surrender to sound.

Day Two began under an unstable sky, bursts of sunlight pierced by sudden rain. At the MONOM Studio, Suricata and Ruby Singh opened with organic vibrations, textures that seemed to breathe. In Saal 2, Alakari carved sculptural sonic masses directly into bodies. But the emotional peak, for me, arrived at the MONOM Studio: Suzanne Ciani,with her Buchla 200e, presented Improvisation on Four Sequences, filling the room with liquid waves, flashes of 70s funk, cosmic trajectories. It was intense, expansive, cosmic, and deeply moving. Right after, Jan Jelinek shattered perception: minimal glitch, jazz fragments, refracted memories looping like shards of broken glass.

The evening glowed with Evita Manji, elegant and mysterious, her voice suspended like a transparent veil; Bobby Beethoven, pure unpredictability shifting before our eyes; and Gaika, his sharp-edged rap tearing through the suspension. Word-blades that brought us back to the burning urgency of now, as I write, as you read.