Matera 2019

Ancient future

Built thanks to the contribution of the local community, the project explores the roots of music as a collective production phenomenon. Open Sound Festival presents two sections, both animated by research and performance activities: URLA and O.S.A.

To find a new pitch, it is necessary to start again from silence. This is the aim of IN ViTRØ, a sound art project that seeks to investigate the relationship between sound and silence by listening to the voice of Matera: amongst the streets and squares, and even slipping into alleys and caves. Exhibitions, installations, performances, residences, workshops and studios will be harmonised under the direction of prestigious national and international partners and young artists.

What do Matera’s stars sound like? Three excellent composers, Georg Friedrich Haas and Nicola Campogrande and Damiano D'Ambrosio, will be answering this question when they compose three works for the very first time, inspired and created in a process of experimental co-creation, during a series of artistic residencies held in Matera between 2018 and 2019. 

What if the concept of opera were rebuilt on the foundations of silence? Arriving in Matera, the feeling of contrast is strong. It is a city of juxtapositions: The Plains and the Sassi (Matera’s Ancient Cave Dwellings), shame and pride, stone and cement, noise and silence. The Sassi district, in particular, holds onto the memory of changes. 

Neighbourhood, community, socio-cultural models are a (role-playing) game. Matera 2019 will host a L.A.R.P. (live action role playing) even and different urban games in an artistic and creative context dedicated to the importance of involvement and enhancement of social capital.

Matera is the only place where entire neighbourhoods are created out of cave dwellings. And from now on, it will also be the home to timeless music. Embark on a journey to rediscover folk music from Lucania (the old name for Basilicata) and bring it into 2019. 

Sometimes it takes more than just a quick glance to connect the sky to the ground. In nature there exists an elegant, almost magical, example which shows us that it is possible to live in the space between the ground and the objects extending from it, be that a tree, plant, flower or any other natural structure: a spider’s web.

It might seem like the beginning of a fairytal e set in a faraway land, but it really is going to happen, in Pisticci, in 2019. Essenza will be a place, a house, where visitors can immerse themselves in an interactive experience inspired by the world of Amaro Lucano, Essential Partner of Matera: European Capital of Culture 2019.

Matera European Photography / Visions from Europe, an international project promoted by Matera European Photography and Matera Diffusa with Canon Europe and the Matera-Basilicata 2019 Foundation, combining personal knowledge and iconographic diffusion with an original and contemporary vision of Matera and Basilicata through the eyes of young European students of photography and their professors.