TERRAFORMA EXO and the New Politics of Public Rituals
Words by Diego Putto
EXO, the latest format from Terraforma, seems to pose exactly this question—without necessarily offering a definitive answer. From the protected nature of Villa Arconati—a liminal, dreamlike, isolated space—the event has shifted into the living heart of the city, inside its parks, its flows, its cultural institutions. A radical transformation, yes, but not necessarily a renunciation. Rather, an experiment.
For the second year in a row, Milan hosted this constellation of performances, concerts, and sound installations in symbolic venues like Parco Sempione, Torre Branca, Triennale, and Teatro Principe. It’s no longer just a festival, but a kind of urban dramaturgy, in which musical gestures intertwine with civic rhythms in real time. And it’s precisely in this friction—between public openness and a desire for community—that EXO’s strength, and its fragility, lies.
In a key text for understanding the political force of the dancing body, The Coming Community by Giorgio Agamben, we read that “the festival is not meant to produce, but to suspend production.” It’s a collective exception, a shared pause that interrupts the time of utility. But what happens when that pause becomes part of a city’s cultural programming—among sponsorships, grants, and museum partnerships?
EXO doesn’t avoid this question—it makes it its operative ground. On the one hand, it embraces being part of the urban cultural machine; on the other, it works to stretch its limits, to push its thresholds, to experiment with hybrid forms. The result is a composite environment: a festival that doesn’t pretend to be marginal, but also doesn’t fully submit to the institutional narrative of inclusion. Instead, it inhabits ambiguity.
Among the most emblematic experiences of this edition was FAVN by Florian Hecker, co-curated by Unsound Festival and staged in the Palazzina Appiani—a neoclassical building once designed as a theatre of imperial power for Napoleon. Hecker turns the space into a zone of perceptual distortion. More than a concert, it’s a sensorial deconstruction—where listening becomes uncertain, even hallucinatory.
At the other extreme, atop the Gio Ponti-designed Torre Branca, Lorenzo Senni transforms the city skyline into a massive emotional surface. His endless mix of build-ups—mostly extracted from trance music and stripped of their climaxes—conjures a state of continuous suspension, a longing without resolution. An aesthetic of delay, perhaps also of desire.
One of the most powerful moments came with The Drum and the Bird, a project by Bill Kouligas in collaboration with Forensis, a research agency investigating forms of state and corporate violence. The piece focused on the colonial genocide carried out by Germany in Namibia—over 65,000 Herero and Nama were killed between 1904 and 1907. The performance didn’t aim to illustrate or moralize, but to create an auditory rupture, a living archive that made historical trauma resonate in the present.
Likewise, The Talk—a speculative audio-visual lecture staged in the Triennale Gardens during Milan’s Pride parade—used spoken word, ambient textures, and glitchy visuals to question the construction of narrative and perception. Here, the party becomes a problem of language. Or better: a place where language itself begins to disobey.
EXO doesn’t operate through neat oppositions—public/private, inside/outside, center/periphery—but through gradients, overlaps, contact zones. Its form adapts to complex environments without abandoning the critical question of what it means to exist as a festival today. It’s a celebration that knows it’s being watched, regulated, and yet tries to maintain a certain instability. It doesn’t explode—it vibrates.
At Teatro Principe, HiTech removed the barriers between the DJ booth and the crowd, reopening the symbolic and physical space of the dancefloor. In that simple act, there was something deeply political—not a nostalgic retreat into some lost underground, but a bold, present-tense affirmation: we’re here.
And maybe that’s the most radical gesture today: to keep dancing, inside the world, with all its contradictions.