Cima Norma Art Festival 2022

Cima Norma Art Festival
9th July - 4th September 2022
La Fabbrica del Cioccolato (Ex Cima Norma), Torre (Blenio)

Once again this year, the Blenese summer will be enlivened by the events promoted as part of the Cima Norma Art Festival, an interdisciplinary event now in its third edition, which offers an opportunity to engage with some of the most current expressions of contemporary culture, from visual arts to music, from theatre to literature. The Festival, which this year is entitled "Reading Worlds", will take place from 9 July to 4 September in the spaces of the Fondazione La Fabbrica del Cioccolato in Torre.
This is the complete programme of events:

9 July - 4 September 2022
Reading Worlds: James Bridle, Collectif Fact, Matteo Fieni, Fragmentin with Lauren Huret, Dominique Koch, Salvatore Vitale

Exhibition
Ex Hours:
Thursday to Sunday
10.00-18.00
Monday-Wednesday
closed
On the occasion of evening events, opening hours are extended until 11 p.m.

The exhibition at the centre of this third edition of the Festival confronts the legibility of today's world, proposing some contemporary positions that focus their critical attention on the way in which reality is interpreted today in a context dominated by digitalisation, algorithms, Big Data and the increasing diffusion of forms of artificial intelligence. What emerges forcefully is the need for a different reading of the world, starting from the questioning of our own identity, which can no longer be seen as an autonomous and pre-existing entity, but must be read as the fruit of a continuous metamorphosis, as a relational process that is defined within the incessant exchange that we entertain with the ecosystems with which we cohabit.

9 July 
6 p.m.
Official opening of the 2022 edition
Ex Cima Norma - Torre/Blenio

Official opening of the third edition and inauguration of the exhibition with speeches by Elio Schenini, artistic director of the Festival and Giovanni Casella Piazza, president of the Fondazione La Fabbrica del Cioccolato. Followed by refreshments.

9 July
7 p.m.
Julie Semoroz
Concert
Ex Cima Norma - Torre/Blenio
Julie Semoroz's musical research moves with an experimental attitude between sounds and noises, focusing on the human voice and field recordings. Myéline, the piece presented here, is a reflection on the possibilities of human and animal vocalisation and the transmission of neural information. In the human brain there are 100 billion neurons whose task is to enable the exchange of information between the environment and the organism and which are capable of receiving, analysing and producing information. Within this mechanism, the function of myelin is to greatly increase the speed of message conduction. Part of the sounds that make up the piece come from information obtained from experiments conducted with electroencephalograms at the University of Geneva's CISA and made available to the artist.

9 July
9 p.m.
Bit-tuner
Concert
Ex Cima Norma - Tower/Blenio
As for many electronic musicians, field recording, i.e. the recording of ambient sounds, is one of the particles that nourishes the research of Marcel Gschwend, aka Bit-Tuner, an artist from St. Gallen living in Zurich, who in a career spanning more than 20 years has developed a unique and unmistakable style, frequently collaborating in areas as diverse as dance, theatre, visual arts, fashion shows and film soundtracks. His compositions range from hip-hop-beat to technoid-bass music via electronica and noise. The result is a soundscape that tends towards dark tones, but is always charged with great energy and nourished by powerful bass.

9 July
10.30 pm
Johnny Haway
Dj-Set
DJ Johnny Haway, reads the world from a chameleon-like attitude. This means that musical form is somewhat irrelevant to him. In his music production he tries his hand at different genres and often mixes them together. He beats drums against 8-bit, dilutes noise with African dance music, shakes up electronics with Disco Halal, combines experimental techno with tribal chants. DJ Johnny Haway has a penchant for shaking the bones whether it's making people dance in unusual ways or simply making them lie back and contemplate the stars.

30 July
17.00
Sara Catella - Reading
Ex Cima Norma - Torre/Blenio

Glimpses of female life in Valle di Blenio at the beginning of the 20th century reconstructed from the "reading" of some photographs by Roberto Donetta, one of the most significant figures among the pioneers of photography in Ticino. This is the starting point for Sara Catella's debut book Le malorose. With a personal linguistic impasto, the author gives voice to the midwife Caterina Capra, called to the bedside of Don Antonio, parish priest of Corzoneso, who has lost the use of speech due to an unknown illness. The frank and vigorous voice of the midwife, which rises and swells page after page, takes in, in a choral j'accuse, the voices of the many women she has met over the years. The result is a gallery of female portraits through which the author becomes the spokesperson for a protest that remains - even for those of us who believe we live in 'another' world - surprisingly topical

30 July
6.30 p.m.
Eutopia - Theatre performance
Ex Cima Norma - Tower/Blenio
Combining performance, installation and game design, in their very recent project entitled Eutopia, premiered at the LAC in Lugano in March, Cristina Galbiati and Ilija Luginbühl question old biological, ecological and anthropological models. The performance develops on the basis of a participatory mechanism in which the spectators, seated around an enormous game table, are invited to "read" and modify with their actions the symbolic territory with which they must interact. Involved in a board game whose rules are initially obscure, but then become increasingly clear, the spectators contribute with their choices to delineating possible worlds in which the human and the non-human are called upon to coexist. The number of spectators for each performance is limited and reservations are required. Reservations can be made by sending an e-mail to: [email protected]

30 July
8 pm
Chuchchepati Orchestra - Concert-installation
Ex Cima Norma - Tower/Blenio
By 2050, half of the glaciers in the Alps will have disappeared. In the meantime, the ice masses will continue to creak, tingle, groan, drip, screech and gurgle. The multiple acoustic expressions of these retreating giants were listened to and recorded with underwater and contact microphones as part of a field recording project initiated by Professor Girot of the Institute for Landscape Architecture at ETH Zurich. With its project Gletscherzungen, which combines live concert and sound installation, the Chuchchepati Orchestra, consisting of Ludwig Berger, Dieb13, Julian Sartorius and Patrick Kessler, creates a musical dialogue with the sounds of the glaciers, immersing the audience in an unprecedented sound world.

30 July 
9 p.m.
Simon Grab and Francesco Giudici - Concert
Ex Cima Norma - Torre/Blenio
The musical project resulting from the collaboration of Zurich-born Simon Grab and Ticino-born Francesco Giudici is a sound interpretation of the world, starting with a crude and illusion-free reading of a reality, the contemporary one, over which many threats loom. Like war sirens announcing an imminent disaster, their sounds invite us to become aware of the inevitable end of the Anthropocene. From the dialogue between Simon Grab's pulsating frequencies and no-input electronic sounds and Francesco Giudici's guitar drones, a singular musical structure takes shape that feeds on feelings of loss and anger and appears as an obsessive call for change. Accompanying their music are video images by artist Aline D'Auria.

13 August
8 pm
Fabio Pusterla - Reading
Ex Cima Norma - Torre/Blenio

Poet, translator and essayist, author of numerous poetry collections and essays on literary and linguistic themes, Fabio Pusterla, one of the most authoritative voices of contemporary Swiss Italian literature, has been "reading the world" for fifty years through his work as a writer. The need to continue to cultivate and refine our ability to read texts and thus the world was one of his main concerns during his long years of teaching in the Canton's high schools. Interweaving his own reflections and poems and those of authors he has met or translated over the years, Pusterla tells us about the incessant attempt to place the world in a universe of meaning. An attempt that constitutes the essence of that inseparable pair composed of two mutually specular and complementary acts such as writing and reading.

13 August 
9.00 p.m.
Jonathan Frigeri - Musical performance
Ex Cima Norma - Tower/Blenio

Jonathan Frigeri, a Ticino artist and musician working in Geneva, has for years been investigating the ways in which radio contributes to our reading of everyday reality. What he is proposing on this occasion is a project that mixes elements of experimental music, sound art and performance. A digression somewhere between a fantastic tale and a scientific experiment that gradually seems to slip into an occult and mysterious dimension. Starting from a reflection on radio space and its relationship with man, Frigeri stages a ritual to give listeners a new experience, imbued with magic.

13 August
9.30 pm
Joke Lanz - Concert
Ex Cima Norma - Torre/Blenio
Joke Lanz is one of the pioneers of the Swiss independent electronic scene. His research spans improvised and experimental music, noise and turntablism, performance art and concrete music. In addition to soundtracks for theatre and cinema, radio work, installations and objects, his work is characterised by two constants: his activity as a turntablist in which he manipulates turntables and vinyl records, and the Sudden Infant project, which he transformed into a trio in 2014 after 25 years of solo work. In an intense performance that mixes sound fragments and words, Joke Lanz talks about the difficulty of finding meaning in the world around us.