TERRAFORMA EXO | A CULTURAL MANIFESTATION FOR A NEW ECOLOGY OF SOUND

Curated by Diego Putto

The second chapter of Terraforma Exo moves forward with a more defined voice and a deeper connection to the cities it inhabits. In Milan, Lorenzo Senni presents Eureka! (Mix Legacy 2011–2025) in the vertical solitude of Torre Branca, while Florian Hecker’s FAVN unfolds inside the neoclassical Palazzina Appiani. A club night at Gatto Verde brings together HiTech and MI-EL, bridging the city’s experimental core with its nightlife. In Rome, the legendary Underground Resistance takes over the overgrown grounds of Forte Antenne. In Palermo, Rrose performs Tenney’s Having Never Written A Note For Percussion in the lush quiet of Villa Tasca.

More than a program, Terraforma Exo is an approach: it listens to the city, reads its forgotten corners, and lets sound speak across time and context. This year, in collaboration with Atlas of Change, it turns its attention to the systems that shape our lives—climate, infrastructure, urban space—making their invisible mechanics audible and real.

Milan remains its centre of gravity, with Parco Sempione—Torre Branca, Triennale Garden, and Palazzina Appiani—as its core stage. But the project stretches further: to Rome, where nature and history intertwine in the ruins of Forte Antenne; and finally to Palermo, where Villa Tasca hosts the closing chapter—a place where centuries of memory echo quietly through the trees.

FLORIAN HECKER PRESENTS: FAVN

FAVN is an automated performance tracing the blurry boundaries between reality and imagination, sensory perception and hallucination. Evoking notions surrounding late-19th-century psychophysics and the quantification of the senses,inFAVN, we follow Debussy in sonically reincarnating the protagonist of Mallarmé’s 1876 poem “L’après-midi d’un faun.” FAVN uses the question ‘What did I hear?’ as a way to interrogate the constructive cognitive processes that intervene in apparently purely sensory, or indeed sensual, experiences.

FORENSIS (FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE) & BILL KOULIGAS PRESENT: THE DRUM AND THE BIRD

 

The Drum and the Bird is a new multi-sensory performance made by Forensis in collaboration with Bill Kouligas. An immersive auditory experience, the work examines the relationship between lost ecologies and colonial exploitation. Growing out of research on Germany’s colonial history in Namibia, originally undertaken by Forensis and its sister agency Forensic Architecture, the work weaves together generative environmental audio, oral testimonies, and spatio-visual modelling, and compels an audience to contemplate the price of colonial amnesia by highlighting voices and sounds that have been silenced or altered as a result of this history. Landscapes are repositories – carrying within them all life’s narratives.

Rocks, sediments, flora and fauna have all borne witness to transformations beyond human perception. How has witnessing been encoded within them? What stories do they wish to tell? The audio-visual project, The Drum and the Bird is thus a form of memory work. Each actor/character—sand, water, wind, tree, shark, human – within the Namibian landscape responds to time uniquely. Dub theory provides a framework through which these testimonies may be understood at the threshold of loss.

HEITH, JAMES K, GÜNSELI YALCINKAYA PRESENT: THE TALK [A/V SHOW]

 

The Talk is a multi-disciplinary performance, featuring musicians Heith and James K, artist-researcher Günseli Yalcinkaya and original set design by Andrea Belosi. Presented in the style of a surreal panel talk, the show takes inspiration from the Antikythera mechanism, the world’s first artificial computer, to imagine an atemporal reality where hypnotic soundscapes open up portals into the unknown, and spoken word intervals act as fictioning tools to explore the ways in which narratives, as told through the lens of various technologies, shape our perception of reality.

HITECH

 

Merging classic Detroit Ghetto-tech, house & hip-hop, HiTechare on a three-man mission to destroy the self-consciousness of mainstream “bottle service” club culture by bringing back the chaotic fun, impeccable melodies and sense of humour of early Detroit dance culture. Since the release of their first two albums the group have won over a legion of dedicated fans, including Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown, Pink Siifu, DJ Assault, Show Me TheBody, Crystalmess Nia Archives, to name just a few. Along the way, they’ve played much-lauded shows at Berghain, The Lot ,Rinse, The Face’s Rated and events across Paris Fashion Week.

 

UREKA! (Mix Legacy 2011–2025) – Torre Branca

EUREKA! is a curated selection of moments drawn from Lorenzo Senni’s iconic mixes, spanning nearly fifteen years of sonic exploration.
These “composed-mixes” functioned as experimental frameworks through which Senni developed his theoretical and aesthetic investigations into Pointillistic Trance and Rave- Voyeurism.
By isolating and recombining hundreds of build-ups—primarily sourced from Trance, though not limited to the genre—Senni constructs extended, non-linear progressions that interrogate the structural and affective mechanics of electronic dance music.

 

MI-EL

 

A deeply personal selector – with radars for the wacky, the moody and the lowercase – mi- el’s style is a deft balancing act, from sung soundscapes and explorations of her heritage to contemporary bass, electro, and vanguard electronics.
Those who’ve caught her live will know the former MOT booker and now NTS resident is apt to blur the thinning line between selector and sound artist, having torn up countless great nights, venues and festivals in just a few years: dare we say Panorama Bar, Field Manuevers, Boiler Room, De School, Big Dyke Energy and FOLD. It’s folk wisdom, almost a given at this point, that mi-el is killing it.