Public Program

Mo’min Swaitat presents a listening session from the Palestinian Sound Archive .It is a celebration of music, spoken word and album artwork from historic Palestine, mainly from the 1960s – 1990s. It is part of Majazz Project, a Palestinian-led record label and research platform founded by actor, director and filmmaker Mo’min Swaitat in 2020. 
Over several years, Swaitat amassed an extensive archive of cassettes and vinyl records from Palestine and beyond, spanning everything from field recordings of Bedouin weddings to revolutionary albums from the First and Second Intifadas, instrumental tracks, poetry, soul, folk songs and jazz. Many of these were acquired from a former record label in Swaitat’s hometown Jenin, in the north of the West Bank. 
Swaitat comes from a long line of Bedouin musicians and storytellers, and the archive references his rootedness in music as a means of celebrating one’s culture and sense of belonging.

Video Sound Art on the occasion of the 14th edition of the festival has launched a new open call proposing for the first time to suspend the usual process of producing new works and place at the center a theoretical critical investigation. The Open Call was thus born from the intention to reflect on the CASE theme through a “convivial” research methodology, encouraging a common and participatory reflection.

The winner project is What do we want? Hacking Monopoly proposed by Zeroscena, a collective founded in 2020 by Elisa La Boria and Luka Bagnoli. This is how they present their work: ‘Starting from a familiar, domestic object, we intend to raise pressing social issues. Thinking of the word ‘houses’, somewhere in our memory appear those little green wooden moulds for which we risked ruining many friendships and family relationships. Our idea is that, in the same way, real houses are the object of a social rift. Hacking Monopoly is a laboratory where, through experimentation in a protected environment (the board game), strategies are invented to hack reality. And this is ultimately what we want’.
As part of the festival’s public program, the winning project is presented through a convivial meeting in which issues such as the housing emergency, social inequalities and the scarcity of resources are confronted and ‘played critically’.

What does it mean to live in the “pre-mega event” [i.e. upcoming Winter Olympic Game] neighborhood? The panel discussion will present the results of the ethnographic research conducted between fall 2022 and early 2024 in the southeast quadrant of Milan, one of the areas of the city undergoing the most rapid transformations, suspended between gentrification processes already largely advanced and areas still heavily criminalized and stigmatized in public opinion. Right in the middle of a territorial diagonal that connects the two largest works currently under construction related to the upcoming Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics – the Olympic Village at Scalo di Porta Romana and the new Palaitalia in Rogoredo – lies the most working-class neighborhood of Corvetto, an area now represented as Milan’s new frontier of change, or even “the neighborhood of the future,” a specific imaginary well embodied by the panorama of cranes and scaffolding that surrounds it. However, behind these narratives heralded through celebratory tones, today Corvetto’s present still seems disturbing. Between rhetorics of degradation and appeals to a phantom return of decorum, between attempts at beautification and policies of the unwanted, of aesthetic control of public space, we will try to dismantle the language that influences and facilitates some recurrent dynamics of housing and spatial inequality. Through some ethnographic snapshots, we will recount the increasingly troubled everyday life of Milan’s new southern frontier.

Musical excursion straddling genres – acoustic, jazz, soundtracks and electronics – by musician, music producer and sound designer Painé Cuadrelli. “When I think of the idea of home, I imagine an intimate and personal space, both a physical place and the sum total of the memories we carry with us wherever we go.” In light of these words, the artist’s musical selection will be inspired by the one he usually offers to the people that he welcomes to his house, thus transforming Circolo San Luis into an extension of his living room.

Sahha (صحة) is Arabic for health and is commonly used in some Arab countries as a toast when sharing a drink. At Circolo San Luis, a drink will be served by the same name, offering a toast for a new ritual. Negroni is mythically said to have been invented nearby, and Sahha is a unique twist on this classic, infused with a hint of the Levant. Each glass will be rimmed with Lebanese Arak, an anise-flavored spirit, offering the aroma and a taste of Beirut—a place the artist Arash Fayez has only visited in dreams. Before sipping, find someone you don’t know and share a Sahha, wishing health to a stranger.

In recent years, rap music, in its subgenres trap and drill, has conquered the top of the Italian and international charts. It has done so by often talking about issues such as social redemption, hood-life and inequalities. Precisely because rap is born in the urban context, this panorama also includes some places in the city and the province that are usually forgotten -except when they hit the headlines. In this talk, some songs will be listened to and analyzed to narrate realities “off the map”, that is, not considered geographically or culturally “at the center”, but which contain fundamental social dynamics to describe contemporaneity.