BASECAMP
Istituto Sant’Eugenio,
Via al Sasso 1, Locarno
Edition V
🅟🅞🅟🅤🅟
08–16.08.2024
5:30pm–9:30pm
In Conversation We Trust
Istituto Sant'Eugenio
Via al Sasso 1, Locarno
Opened everyday from August 8th to 16th,
5.30pm–9.30pm
Noémi Büchi
Noémi Büchi (*1991, Zürich) is a Swiss/French composer and multimedia artist that creates and explores the potential
of cross-genre musical structures. Her music is defined by a delicate synthesis of textural rhythms and electroacoustic-orchestral abstraction.
She contrasts rhythmic physicality with disruption and play-fully emphasizes irregularities, creating an expansive listening experience marked by detail and elevation. Her musical work moves in the areas of electroacoustic composition, live performances, audiovisual shows, music for film, music for contemporary dance, music for installations, music for theater and for orchestral works.
Baronesse
An electronic instrumental project from Ticino, they’re on a mission to electrify the dance floor with their fusion of Afrobeat, soulful vibes, funky Brazilian grooves, and deep house beats. Merging DJ sets with live percussion, they redefine the rhythm experience with an audacious twist.
Book Launch: Hold the Sound
The publication “Hold The Sound” experiments with giving tangible form to the seemingly immaterial nature of sound. Within these pages, artists and researchers offer their thoughts, capturing sound’s fleeting essence through words and visuals.
This book is an invitation to engage deeply with auditory experiences, inspiring further exploration into the world of sound.
Opening: BaseCamp Library
The BaseCamp Library is a new addition to the BaseCamp PopUp. This year’s theme focuses on sound—an element that moves through air, breathing life into moving images; some call it magic.
Every evening at BaseCamp PopUp, there will be an extension of the library’s theme through concerts, performances, and talks.
Disse B2B Paul Trona
Disse is a Swiss producer and DJ based in Locarno. As a producer and DJ with deep roots in hip-hop, his musical journey has led him to explore and embrace the world of electronic music, drawing inspiration from the atmospheric sounds of the 90s and early 2000s.
He has released two solo EPs, “Temperatura Ambiente” in 2019 and “Ventagli” in 2021. One of his most important collaborations is with Ele A, a Swiss artist for whom Disse is the main producer and official DJ. In 2023, he produced the entire “Globo” EP, followed by the “Acqua” EP in 2024.
Dia Beat
Dia Beat’s musical exploration is influenced by adolescent memories, emotional depth and melancholic curiosity. Dia Beat sets evoke hugs, sobs and the hope that things will get better. A project by S. Pellanda (Bern, CH), co-founder of Fishnet Collective and multidisciplinary artist working in graphic design, writing and music.
VVSPANTHER
VVSPANTHER is a dynamic artist from Lausanne, known for her eclectic musical style. With influences ranging from rap and trap to electro and bossa nova, she enjoys blending genres and keeping her audience intrigued. As a member of the Dynasty808 collective, VVSPANTHER creates music that is vibrant and diverse, combining depth with a light, sometimes intense touch. Her unique flow and originality make her a standout artist with a distinctive sound.
Why D'Ya Do It Installation Launch
45 years ago, Marianne Faithfull released “Broken English”, an iconic album that includes the provocative song “Why D’Ya Do It”, a track that has become over time a feminist anthem against injustices. A highly relevant piece that we have asked young directors, musicians, singers, and writers to reinterpret with their voices, creating an audiovisual installation.
A legendary recording of the track made in 1995 at the Montreux Jazz Festival thus merges with three original creations. A project developed in collaboration between BaseCamp and the Montreux Jazz Festival with the support of Play Suisse SSR SRG and Fondation Suisa.
Popa
Popa is a Milan-based fashion designer and musician, crafting a unique blend of Italian glamour and dreamlike soundscapes. Inspired by the hedonistic charm of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Popa’s music channels the essence of “dolce vita”, bringing to life an era of opulent disco dreams and timeless elegance.
Popa’s sound is a celebration of Italian disco, where champagne flows endlessly and the sun always shines. With a penchant for crafting tracks that evoke a sense of perpetual summer, Popa’s music effortlessly transports listeners to a world where sophistication and indulgence reign supreme.
Woolf and the Moon
Woolf and The Moon, a dynamic film/sound duo from Bern, merges the raw essence of nature with futuristic realms through their experimental sound art and storytelling. Composed of Nora Lune and Urs Rihs, their work delves into the magnetic pull between untamed natural archetypes and the surreal landscapes of distant moons.
Nora Lune creates multi-layered, auto-fictional daydreams from the everyday and pop culture, also performing as a trance and ambient DJ under the name Nora Asteroid.
Urs Rihs is a tireless freelancer deeply embedded in Bern’s underground scene as a journalist, radio host, DJ, and event organizer. For him, the raw and unrefined aspects of music are as essential as a hearty meal shared with friends.
Andrew Norman Wilson
In the twenty-tens, Andrew Norman Wilson had seen his art go viral a few times, and landed four biennials—the start of a promising career. In “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now”, his recent viral essay for The Baffler, Wilson asks what precisely that looks like in an industry that pays in clout and almost never in cash.
Join Wilson for a live performance of “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now”, featuring new images, videos, and passages that paint a stark portrait, replete with a rib removal and an episode of penguin-induced dissociation, of his departure from a contemporary art world whose works serve no one but yacht owners and curatorial bureaucrats with terminal degrees.
zweikommasieben
Members of the group behind zweikommasieben, a Swiss magazine focused on contemporary music and sounds, also perform as zweikommasieben DJs in various configu-rations. Whether providing background music in an exhibition space, setting the mood in a bar, hosting a radio show, enhancing an art opening, or occasionally performing in a club, their approach aligns with the magazine’s ethos: they play what they enjoy.
Their range includes trap music by artists such as Lala &ce, Cardi B, or Ufo361; club music from labels like Youth or Principe; and more experimental sounds.
Doll$ on the Block
“Doll$ on the Block” is an event designed to offer the LGBTQI+ community in and around Ticino a safe and enjoyable space for self-expression. The event seeks to fill a local gap by providing a platform for various art forms, including DJ sets, live performances, dance performances, and exhibitions. The goal is to create an environment where fear of judgment is absent, combining sound, aesthetics, and humor specifically tailored for the audience.
HAUSVRAU
A vibrant representative of the Latinx community, HAUSVRAU brings a much-needed fresh perspective to electronic music and performance art. With a mix of Brazilian funk, pop, house, Latin techno, and vogue beats, she provides a dynamic experience that challenges conventional norms. Known as the Brazilian-funk-punk-vogue-pressure-valve princess, she is the fairy you didn’t know you needed.
SEYNA
Growing up with two distinct cultures, SEYNA’s blend of music is integral to her creativity. Her journey through music led her to fall in love with Conscious Rap, Trap, Gangsta Rap, and many subgenres of Hip Hop. Influenced by artists like Nicki Minaj, and more recently Doja Cat, Ice Spice, and Sexyy Red, female rappers have left a significant mark on her sets. Though she prefers not to label herself, if pressed, she would describe her sets as “ass-shaking music”.
Rizomi
Rizomi is a non-binary multidisciplinary artist whose creativity spans a wide range of art forms, each leaving a distinct mark. Their artistic journey includes tattooing, pole dance, ice skating, and visual arts, with each medium serving as a unique outlet for expression. As a DJ, Rizomi explores sound-scapes featuring Jersey club, vogue beats, baile funk, and experimental electronic music. Their DJ sets offer a kaleidoscopic journey through sound, blending genres and pushing auditory boundaries to create a unique and memorable experience for the audience.
Maya Luna
Originally from Mexico, Maya Luna moved to Leeds at 16 to begin her dance career. Two years later, she received a scholarship to the prestigious London Contemporary Dance School. Inspired during lockdown, Maya discovered pole dancing as a new form of creative expression, blending her professional training with Latin influences. Her style is both flowing and ethereal, merging remarkable strength with grace.
Maya views the pole as a canvas for shared expression and enjoys collaborating to create mesmerizing shapes and dynamic compositions. Her innovative approach extends to short film production, where she crafts immersive visual stories. Recently, Maya collaborated with Blackstage for a once-a-year performance and showcased a short film on Nowness. Her work is akin to cinematography, where each movement becomes part of a captivating narrative.
SURRENDAS
United first through pole dance and now connected by their passion, friendship, and love for the art, SURRENDAS values diversity and supports the recognition of strippers as creators within the pole dance community.
Obsidian
Forged under the immense forces of nature, Obsidian emerges with a shiny surface that masks sharp edges. Existing for centuries in the shadows of reality, she now takes human form, absorbing knowledge through new technologies. Obsidian reveals the mirror of humanity’s chronically online behavior to the audience.
Aio Frei
“Stone Witnessing – Resonances in the swirls” is a listening performance meandering through stratas of deep time and queer temporality, listening positionality, solidified queerness transforming on broken earth, stone butches, pillow rocks and rocky transitions, inhuman geography and racialized geology, animate inanimacy, colliding tectonic plates, crumbling plateaus and non-extractivist frequencies of relationality.
For “Stone Witnessing”, which blends improvisation, tender noise and essayistic mixing, sound artist Aio Frei seeks the seemingly insurmountable temporary connection with stones through sonic touch and melts thought-pebbles by a range of queer voices into an sedimentation about geologic temporality and histories of non/separability.
The Future of Cinema: AI and Generative Humanity
Paul Trillo in conversation with Miriam de Rosa, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and Richard Misek, University of Bergen.
Text-to-video generation signals a new era in audiovisual creation, allowing a greater number of people to realize and share their visions while challenging established norms of perceiving reality and humanity. How does an artist work with such new technology? How does a viewer evaluate AI generated images? What considerations around economics and image rights surround such images?
Paul Trillo has established himself as a leading creator in the field of audiovisual generative AI, pushing the limits of the visual imagination, and offers his own hands-on experiences and insights. Miriam De Rosa is a leading researcher in experimental, new media, and post-cinema film and visual art. Richard Misek is a scholar, activist, and filmmaker whose most recent work is the award-winning A History of the World According to Getty Images. Together they delve into the evolving landscape of film and storytelling shaped by advanced algorithms.
DJ GRILL
Born on the shores of Lake Ceresio at LSD (Lido San Domenico), DJ GRILL serves up an irresistible blend of music and rhythms. Get ready for a sonic barbecue where eclectic beats and smooth grooves come together in perfect harmony.
Andrea Marioni, aka DJ GRILL, also founded the radio project Lumpen Station. With his team and guests they will broadcast daily inteviews at BaseCamp from 6 to 7.30 p.m.
Jonathan Frigeri
The project fuses elements of experimental music, sound art and performance. It is a digression through the issues of radio material, sound perception and its invisible space, the disembodied voice and its connection to the human being.
The in situ performance invites the audience to reflect on the ephemeral and intangible nature of radio broadcasts and sound waves. The sonic space becomes an imaginary canvas onto which one's own imagination can be projected between illusion, reality and belief. It is a sensory journey through the invisible dimensions of sound, about the power of the voice and radio waves, and a celebration of the human imagination, capable of seeing beyond the limits of the visible and tangible.
Hotline
Hotline is a multidisciplinary project born in 2021 from the collaboration between the curator Marco Alfieri and the photographer Sebastiano Carsana. Each of them have developed their own sound independently and they have joined together to make use of the best of their repertoire in order to convey their shared passion for electronic music to the public.
This combination gives life to a curveball-mix of future thinking electronic music and their experimental approach delivers a storytelling of energetic, conceptual, playful and happy music. Equally focused on production and djing, the goal of the two is to spread their vision and musical aesthetics, going beyond the custom and ordinary, focusing on delivering the right mood.
La Soleggiata
La Soleggiata is your place in the sun! As one of Ticino’s pioneering pop-up bars, they offer a unique opportunity to taste and explore regional products in a thoughtfully designed, inspiring, and sustainable setting. We’re delighted to announce that La Soleggiata will be curating the food
and beverages for the BaseCamp PopUp.
We’re excited to celebrate this special collaboration in true La Soleggiata style: with flair, flavor, and a touch of sunlit magic!
The Future of Cinema: Digital Migrations
Suneil Sanzgiri in conversation with Greg de Cuir Jr. and Devika Girish.
How can cinema respond to colonial legacies of extraction and violence? How can artists and activists use digital technology in ways that bring attention to questions of structural violence and histories of anticolonial struggle? This event will explore the themes of migration, deracination, and diaspora and the ways in which films, and especially the video essay, can travel across space and time, as social and visual journeys in the process of healing distances provoked by colonialism and violence.
Suneil Sanzgiri utilizes a dazzling array of technological and mediatic approaches to explore the effects of migration on peoples, nations and cultures. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South.
Joining him in conversation are Greg de Cuir Jr., co-founder and artistic director of Kinopravda Institute in Belgrade, and Devika Girish, film critic and editor of Film Comment.
Ink!
Having explored the vast lands of the Hardcore Continuum since the late 90’s, Ink! is interested in the connections between signal and noise, and the nuances in-between. Feeding from Techno, Rave, Bass and Dub, and often using more than just two turntables and a mixer, Ink! stirs up sets that are invitations to loose yourself in a sea of sound.
Ink! is active in various cultural projects in his city: he is part of the collective running the mini-club Umbo, which hosts experimental live shows as well as club nights on the edges of contemporary dance music. He is also involved in Zurich’s collaborative Rhizom Festival at Rote Fabrik, which aims
to showcase local, national and international musicians who take push the boundaries of their art.
Belia Winnewisser
Playful and curious, enigmatic and energetic, with a love for small details and grand gestures—Belia Winnewisser’s musical language is deeply personal. Enjoying a piece of her music feels like having a conversation with the Zurich musician, while listening to an entire album is akin to spending a day together.
Belia Winnewisser finds balance in collaboration, whether working with video artist Subrihanna, composing for theater and radio plays, or leading music production workshops
for FLINTA* artists. In these settings, she explicitly opens herself up to the experiences and ideas of others.
Slon
“The more I understand humans, the more I feel plant.”
Born as an enigmatic, shapeshifting experiment, Slon’s debut EP “Majestic Mind Safari Show” was released on –OUS. Featured in The Wire, Clot Magazine, Coeval, and Rumore, the EP is hailed as a collection of hymns for solitary dances, a dynamic blend of avant-pop, IDM, and outsider music.
The work has expanded to incorporate pure sound design and field recording interventions, creating hyperrealistic sound-scapes. The once clumsy, green-faced mutaform has evolved into a familiar alien presence. The sound now exists in
an environment that feels both deeply intimate and extremely remote, reflecting the alienation of being in a space where everything coexists, both outside and inside Slon.
IOKOI
Mara Miccichè aka IOKOI is a composer and sound-artist based in Zurich. Her debut album «Liquefy» (2016) interweaved physical and virtual spaces by negotiating the various meanings of the self in the digital age. The album was a play with drifting instances of identity and presented live as an inter-active AV performance with video artist ARIA.
IOKOI’s follow up “Tales of Another Felt Sense of Self” is being released on -OUS in spring 2021 as a multi-disciplinary work mixing music and video with olfactory and visual arts. Combining avant-pop and spoken word with field recordings and mercurial electronic textures, IOKOI researches the very essence of our being in relation to others.
Beautysalon AYAYAY
Lingering Skin Voices is an ongoing experiment and per-formance that explores how the motion of a tattoo needle can produce sounds beneath the skin. A MIDI board is connected between a tattoo machine and a synthesizer to generate sounds, utilizing skin interactions to produce auditory effects.
A lingerin ritual through the body, shapes, ink, and sound generation.
The Future of Cinema: Listening to Ice
Susan Schuppli (Goldsmiths University) Nora M. Alter (Temple University) and Doreen Mende (Harun Farocki Institut and Geneva University of Art and Design).
How can cinematic practices allow us to see and hear wounds of environmental and social injustice in spaces around us? What kinds of knowledge can be produced through cinematic listening? This talk focuses on unique practices of cinematic intelligence produced through essay cinema and environmental film-making, creating a planetary archive of “material witnesses” and novel forms of intelligence.
Susan Schuppli, a UK-based researcher and artist, will present her audiovisual investigations producing evidence to expose climate-related injustices. Nora M. Alter is the author of the newly published Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence, which critically assesses one of the most celebrated visual artists of the last 50 years. They engage in conversation with Doreen Mende of the Harun Farocki Institut, a research platform that connects the legacy of Harun Farocki to contemporary practices and politics of the audiovisual.
Happy Birthday BaseCamp!
Some people initially thought of BaseCamp as just a youth hostel. Five years later, it’s recognized for its vital role in the Locarno Film Festival, offering diverse and enriching experiences.
It’s been quite the rollercoaster, and we’re ready to celebrate our first five years with you. So come on over – cake’s on us!
Bernet Branca B2B DJ Real Madrid
Selina Bernet aka Bernet Branca is a graphic and type designer and DJ based in Zurich with much love for techno, electro, leftfield sounds and good grooves.
Tillmann Ostendarp aka DJ Real Madrid is a diverse genre-bending musician, producer and DJ based in Zürich. He is one half of the electronic live act “Skiclub Toggenburg” and longtime drummer and trombone player of Swiss singer Faber.
(P.S. Selina font “Chroma” just became part of the new identity of the Locarno Film Festival)
Solo Friend
Even thought Solo Friend normally has friends to mix music with, this time he will be by himself. Expect nothing.
Karaoke
This is how the evening will start. Get ready to give the world your best performance.
Locarno Film Festival main partners
Institutional partner
Destination partner
Istituto Sant’Eugenio,
Via al Sasso 1, Locarno
Edition V
08–16.08.2024
5:30pm–9:30pm
In Conversation We Trust
Istituto Sant’Eugenio,
Via al Sasso 1, Locarno
Edition V
In Conversation We Trust
Opened everyday from August 8th to 16th,
5.30pm–9.30pm
Noémi Büchi
Noémi Büchi (*1991, Zürich) is a Swiss/French composer and multimedia artist that creates and explores the potential of cross-genre musical structures. Her music is defined by a delicate synthesis of textural rhythms and electroacoustic-orchestral abstraction.
She contrasts rhythmic physicality with disruption and play-fully emphasizes irregularities, creating an expansive listening experience marked by detail and elevation. Her musical work moves in the areas of electroacoustic composition, live performances, audiovisual shows, music for film, music for contemporary dance, music for installations, music for theater and for orchestral works.
Baronesse
An electronic instrumental project from Ticino, they’re on a mission to electrify the dance floor with their fusion of Afrobeat, soulful vibes, funky Brazilian grooves, and deep house beats. Merging DJ sets with live percussion, they redefine the rhythm experience with an audacious twist.
Book Launch: Hold the Sound
The publication “Hold The Sound” experiments with giving tangible form to the seemingly immaterial nature of sound. Within these pages, artists and researchers offer their thoughts, capturing sound’s fleeting essence through words and visuals.
This book is an invitation to engage deeply with auditory experiences, inspiring further exploration into the world of sound.
Opening: BaseCamp Library
The BaseCamp Library is a new addition to the BaseCamp PopUp. This year’s theme focuses on sound—an element that moves through air, breathing life into moving images; some call it magic.
Every evening at BaseCamp PopUp, there will be an extension of the library’s theme through concerts, performances, and talks.
Disse B2B Paul Trona
Disse is a Swiss producer and DJ based in Locarno. As a producer and DJ with deep roots in hip-hop, his musical journey has led him to explore and embrace the world of electronic music, drawing inspiration from the atmospheric sounds of the 90s and early 2000s.
He has released two solo EPs, “Temperatura Ambiente” in 2019 and “Ventagli” in 2021. One of his most important collaborations is with Ele A, a Swiss artist for whom Disse is the main producer and official DJ. In 2023, he produced the entire “Globo” EP, followed by the “Acqua” EP in 2024.
Dia Beat
Dia Beat’s musical exploration is influenced by adolescent memories, emotional depth and melancholic curiosity. Dia Beat sets evoke hugs, sobs and the hope that things will get better. A project by S. Pellanda (Bern, CH), co-founder of Fishnet Collective and multidisciplinary artist working in graphic design, writing and music.
VVSPANTHER
VVSPANTHER is a dynamic artist from Lausanne, known for her eclectic musical style. With influences ranging from rap and trap to electro and bossa nova, she enjoys blending genres and keeping her audience intrigued. As a member of the Dynasty808 collective, VVSPANTHER creates music that is vibrant and diverse, combining depth with a light, sometimes intense touch. Her unique flow and originality make her a standout artist with a distinctive sound.
Why D'Ya Do It Installation Launch
45 years ago, Marianne Faithfull released “Broken English”, an iconic album that includes the provocative song “Why D’Ya Do It”, a track that has become over time a feminist anthem against injustices. A highly relevant piece that we have asked young directors, musicians, singers, and writers to reinterpret with their voices, creating an audiovisual installation.
A legendary recording of the track made in 1995 at the Montreux Jazz Festival thus merges with three original creations. A project developed in collaboration between BaseCamp and the Montreux Jazz Festival with the support of Play Suisse SSR SRG and Fondation Suisa.
Popa
Popa is a Milan-based fashion designer and musician, crafting a unique blend of Italian glamour and dreamlike soundscapes. Inspired by the hedonistic charm of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Popa’s music channels the essence of “dolce vita”, bringing to life an era of opulent disco dreams and timeless elegance.
Popa’s sound is a celebration of Italian disco, where champagne flows endlessly and the sun always shines. With a penchant for crafting tracks that evoke a sense of perpetual summer, Popa’s music effortlessly transports listeners to a world where sophistication and indulgence reign supreme.
Woolf and the Moon
Woolf and The Moon, a dynamic film/sound duo from Bern, merges the raw essence of nature with futuristic realms through their experimental sound art and storytelling. Composed of Nora Lune and Urs Rihs, their work delves into the magnetic pull between untamed natural archetypes and the surreal landscapes of distant moons.
Nora Lune creates multi-layered, auto-fictional daydreams from the everyday and pop culture, also performing as a trance and ambient DJ under the name Nora Asteroid.
Urs Rihs is a tireless freelancer deeply embedded in Bern’s underground scene as a journalist, radio host, DJ, and event organizer. For him, the raw and unrefined aspects of music are as essential as a hearty meal shared with friends.
Andrew Norman Wilson
In the twenty-tens, Andrew Norman Wilson had seen his art go viral a few times, and landed four biennials—the start of a promising career. In “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now”, his recent viral essay for The Baffler, Wilson asks what precisely that looks like in an industry that pays in clout and almost never in cash.
Join Wilson for a live performance of “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now”, featuring new images, videos, and passages that paint a stark portrait, replete with a rib removal and an episode of penguin-induced dissociation, of his departure from a contemporary art world whose works serve no one but yacht owners and curatorial bureaucrats with terminal degrees.
zweikommasieben
Members of the group behind zweikommasieben, a Swiss magazine focused on contemporary music and sounds, also perform as zweikommasieben DJs in various configu-rations. Whether providing background music in an exhibition space, setting the mood in a bar, hosting a radio show, enhancing an art opening, or occasionally performing in a club, their approach aligns with the magazine’s ethos: they play what they enjoy.
Their range includes trap music by artists such as Lala &ce, Cardi B, or Ufo361; club music from labels like Youth or Principe; and more experimental sounds.
Doll$ on the Block
“Doll$ on the Block” is an event designed to offer the LGBTQI+ community in and around Ticino a safe and enjoyable space for self-expression. The event seeks to fill a local gap by providing a platform for various art forms, including DJ sets, live performances, dance performances, and exhibitions. The goal is to create an environment where fear of judgment is absent, combining sound, aesthetics, and humor specifically tailored for the audience.
HAUSVRAU
A vibrant representative of the Latinx community, HAUSVRAU brings a much-needed fresh perspective to electronic music and performance art. With a mix of Brazilian funk, pop, house, Latin techno, and vogue beats, she provides a dynamic experience that challenges conventional norms. Known as the Brazilian-funk-punk-vogue-pressure-valve princess, she is the fairy you didn’t know you needed.
SEYNA
Growing up with two distinct cultures, SEYNA’s blend of music is integral to her creativity. Her journey through music led her to fall in love with Conscious Rap, Trap, Gangsta Rap, and many subgenres of Hip Hop. Influenced by artists like Nicki Minaj, and more recently Doja Cat, Ice Spice, and Sexyy Red, female rappers have left a significant mark on her sets. Though she prefers not to label herself, if pressed, she would describe her sets as “ass-shaking music”.
Rizomi
Rizomi is a non-binary multidisciplinary artist whose creativity spans a wide range of art forms, each leaving a distinct mark. Their artistic journey includes tattooing, pole dance, ice skating, and visual arts, with each medium serving as a unique outlet for expression. As a DJ, Rizomi explores sound-scapes featuring Jersey club, vogue beats, baile funk, and experimental electronic music. Their DJ sets offer a kaleidoscopic journey through sound, blending genres and pushing auditory boundaries to create a unique and memorable experience for the audience.
Maya Luna
Originally from Mexico, Maya Luna moved to Leeds at 16 to begin her dance career. Two years later, she received a scholarship to the prestigious London Contemporary Dance School. Inspired during lockdown, Maya discovered pole dancing as a new form of creative expression, blending her professional training with Latin influences. Her style is both flowing and ethereal, merging remarkable strength with grace.
Maya views the pole as a canvas for shared expression and enjoys collaborating to create mesmerizing shapes and dynamic compositions. Her innovative approach extends to short film production, where she crafts immersive visual stories. Recently, Maya collaborated with Blackstage for a once-a-year performance and showcased a short film on Nowness. Her work is akin to cinematography, where each movement becomes part of a captivating narrative.
SURRENDAS
United first through pole dance and now connected by their passion, friendship, and love for the art, SURRENDAS values diversity and supports the recognition of strippers as creators within the pole dance community.
Obsidian
Forged under the immense forces of nature, Obsidian emerges with a shiny surface that masks sharp edges. Existing for centuries in the shadows of reality, she now takes human form, absorbing knowledge through new technologies. Obsidian reveals the mirror of humanity’s chronically online behavior to the audience.
Aio Frei
“Stone Witnessing – Resonances in the swirls” is a listening performance meandering through stratas of deep time and queer temporality, listening positionality, solidified queerness transforming on broken earth, stone butches, pillow rocks and rocky transitions, inhuman geography and racialized geology, animate inanimacy, colliding tectonic plates, crumbling plateaus and non-extractivist frequencies of relationality.
For “Stone Witnessing”, which blends improvisation, tender noise and essayistic mixing, sound artist Aio Frei seeks the seemingly insurmountable temporary connection with stones through sonic touch and melts thought-pebbles by a range of queer voices into an sedimentation about geologic temporality and histories of non/separability.
The Future of Cinema: AI and Generative Humanity
Paul Trillo in conversation with Miriam de Rosa, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and Richard Misek, University of Bergen.
Text-to-video generation signals a new era in audiovisual creation, allowing a greater number of people to realize and share their visions while challenging established norms of perceiving reality and humanity. How does an artist work with such new technology? How does a viewer evaluate AI generated images? What considerations around economics and image rights surround such images?
Paul Trillo has established himself as a leading creator in the field of audiovisual generative AI, pushing the limits of the visual imagination, and offers his own hands-on experiences and insights. Miriam De Rosa is a leading researcher in experimental, new media, and post-cinema film and visual art. Richard Misek is a scholar, activist, and filmmaker whose most recent work is the award-winning A History of the World According to Getty Images. Together they delve into the evolving landscape of film and storytelling shaped by advanced algorithms.
DJ GRILL
Born on the shores of Lake Ceresio at LSD (Lido San Domenico), DJ GRILL serves up an irresistible blend of music and rhythms. Get ready for a sonic barbecue where eclectic beats and smooth grooves come together in perfect harmony.
Andrea Marioni, aka DJ GRILL, also founded the radio project Lumpen Station. With his team and guests they will broadcast daily inteviews at BaseCamp from 6 to 7.30 p.m.
Jonathan Frigeri
The project fuses elements of experimental music, sound art and performance. It is a digression through the issues of radio material, sound perception and its invisible space, the disembodied voice and its connection to the human being.
The in situ performance invites the audience to reflect on the ephemeral and intangible nature of radio broadcasts and sound waves. The sonic space becomes an imaginary canvas onto which one's own imagination can be projected between illusion, reality and belief. It is a sensory journey through the invisible dimensions of sound, about the power of the voice and radio waves, and a celebration of the human imagination, capable of seeing beyond the limits of the visible and tangible.
Hotline
Hotline is a multidisciplinary project born in 2021 from the collaboration between the curator Marco Alfieri and the photographer Sebastiano Carsana. Each of them have developed their own sound independently and they have joined together to make use of the best of their repertoire in order to convey their shared passion for electronic music to the public.
This combination gives life to a curveball-mix of future thinking electronic music and their experimental approach delivers a storytelling of energetic, conceptual, playful and happy music. Equally focused on production and djing, the goal of the two is to spread their vision and musical aesthetics, going beyond the custom and ordinary, focusing on delivering the right mood.
La Soleggiata
La Soleggiata is your place in the sun! As one of Ticino’s pioneering pop-up bars, they offer a unique opportunity to taste and explore regional products in a thoughtfully designed, inspiring, and sustainable setting. We’re delighted to announce that La Soleggiata will be curating the food
and beverages for the BaseCamp PopUp.
We’re excited to celebrate this special collaboration in true La Soleggiata style: with flair, flavor, and a touch of sunlit magic!
The Future of Cinema: Digital Migrations
Suneil Sanzgiri in conversation with Greg de Cuir Jr. and Devika Girish.
How can cinema respond to colonial legacies of extraction and violence? How can artists and activists use digital technology in ways that bring attention to questions of structural violence and histories of anticolonial struggle? This event will explore the themes of migration, deracination, and diaspora and the ways in which films, and especially the video essay, can travel across space and time, as social and visual journeys in the process of healing distances provoked by colonialism and violence.
Suneil Sanzgiri utilizes a dazzling array of technological and mediatic approaches to explore the effects of migration on peoples, nations and cultures. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South.
Joining him in conversation are Greg de Cuir Jr., co-founder and artistic director of Kinopravda Institute in Belgrade, and Devika Girish, film critic and editor of Film Comment.
Ink!
Having explored the vast lands of the Hardcore Continuum since the late 90’s, Ink! is interested in the connections between signal and noise, and the nuances in-between. Feeding from Techno, Rave, Bass and Dub, and often using more than just two turntables and a mixer, Ink! stirs up sets that are invitations to loose yourself in a sea of sound.
Ink! is active in various cultural projects in his city: he is part of the collective running the mini-club Umbo, which hosts experimental live shows as well as club nights on the edges of contemporary dance music. He is also involved in Zurich’s collaborative Rhizom Festival at Rote Fabrik, which aims to showcase local, national and international musicians who take push the boundaries of their art.
Belia Winnewisser
Playful and curious, enigmatic and energetic, with a love for small details and grand gestures—Belia Winnewisser’s musical language is deeply personal. Enjoying a piece of her music feels like having a conversation with the Zurich musician, while listening to an entire album is akin to spending a day together.
Belia Winnewisser finds balance in collaboration, whether working with video artist Subrihanna, composing for theater and radio plays, or leading music production workshops
for FLINTA* artists. In these settings, she explicitly opens herself up to the experiences and ideas of others.
Slon
“The more I understand humans, the more I feel plant.”
Born as an enigmatic, shapeshifting experiment, Slon’s debut EP “Majestic Mind Safari Show” was released on –OUS. Featured in The Wire, Clot Magazine, Coeval, and Rumore, the EP is hailed as a collection of hymns for solitary dances, a dynamic blend of avant-pop, IDM, and outsider music.
The work has expanded to incorporate pure sound design and field recording interventions, creating hyperrealistic sound-scapes. The once clumsy, green-faced mutaform has evolved into a familiar alien presence. The sound now exists in
an environment that feels both deeply intimate and extremely remote, reflecting the alienation of being in a space where everything coexists, both outside and inside Slon.
IOKOI
Mara Miccichè aka IOKOI is a composer and sound-artist based in Zurich. Her debut album «Liquefy» (2016) interweaved physical and virtual spaces by negotiating the various meanings of the self in the digital age. The album was a play with drifting instances of identity and presented live as an inter-active AV performance with video artist ARIA.
IOKOI’s follow up “Tales of Another Felt Sense of Self” is being released on -OUS in spring 2021 as a multi-disciplinary work mixing music and video with olfactory and visual arts. Combining avant-pop and spoken word with field recordings and mercurial electronic textures, IOKOI researches the very essence of our being in relation to others.
Beautysalon AYAYAY
Lingering Skin Voices is an ongoing experiment and per-formance that explores how the motion of a tattoo needle can produce sounds beneath the skin. A MIDI board is connected between a tattoo machine and a synthesizer to generate sounds, utilizing skin interactions to produce auditory effects.
A lingerin ritual through the body, shapes, ink, and sound generation.
The Future of Cinema: Listening to Ice
Susan Schuppli (Goldsmiths University) Nora M. Alter (Temple University) and Doreen Mende (Harun Farocki Institut and Geneva University of Art and Design).
How can cinematic practices allow us to see and hear wounds of environmental and social injustice in spaces around us? What kinds of knowledge can be produced through cinematic listening? This talk focuses on unique practices of cinematic intelligence produced through essay cinema and environmental film-making, creating a planetary archive of “material witnesses” and novel forms of intelligence.
Susan Schuppli, a UK-based researcher and artist, will present her audiovisual investigations producing evidence to expose climate-related injustices. Nora M. Alter is the author of the newly published Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence, which critically assesses one of the most celebrated visual artists of the last 50 years. They engage in conversation with Doreen Mende of the Harun Farocki Institut, a research platform that connects the legacy of Harun Farocki to contemporary practices and politics of the audiovisual.
Happy Birthday BaseCamp!
Some people initially thought of BaseCamp as just a youth hostel. Five years later, it’s recognized for its vital role in the Locarno Film Festival, offering diverse and enriching experiences.
It’s been quite the rollercoaster, and we’re ready to celebrate our first five years with you. So come on over – cake’s on us!
Bernet Branca B2B DJ Real Madrid
Selina Bernet aka Bernet Branca is a graphic and type designer and DJ based in Zurich with much love for techno, electro, leftfield sounds and good grooves.
Tillmann Ostendarp aka DJ Real Madrid is a diverse genre-bending musician, producer and DJ based in Zürich. He is one half of the electronic live act “Skiclub Toggenburg” and longtime drummer and trombone player of Swiss singer Faber.
(P.S. Selina font “Chroma” just became part of the new identity of the Locarno Film Festival)
Solo Friend
Even thought Solo Friend normally has friends to mix music with, this time he will be by himself. Expect nothing.
Karaoke
This is how the evening will start. Get ready to give the world your best performance.
Locarno Film Festival main partners
Institutional partner
Destination partner