Image : La Biennale di Venezia, Venice
Cette actualité est affichée en anglais en attendant que sa traduction soit prête.
The 70th International Festival of Contemporary Music of La Biennale di Venezia, ‘A Child of Sound’, is running in Venice from 10 to 24 October 2026 under the direction of the Berlin-based Italian composer and musician Caterina Barbieri. The programme brings several events a day by soloists and ensembles to venues across the city, from the Arsenale’s Tese dei Soppalchi, Teatro alle Tese and Teatro Piccolo Arsenale to Ca’ Giustinian, the women’s penitentiary on the Giudecca and Padiglione 30 at Forte Marghera.
Barbieri’s title refers to a way of listening that only fresh, unfiltered ears can manage. In her account, approaching new music without preconceptions can also open the listener more fully to the contemporary world.
This year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement went to the Japanese composer and performer Keiji Haino, presented on 12 October at Ca’ Giustinian. Born in Chiba in 1952, Haino turned to music after first being drawn to theatre, joined the band Lost Aaraaf as a vocalist in 1970 and formed Fushitsusha in 1978. The Biennale credits him with more than 200 recordings and over 2,000 concerts across noise, free jazz, blues, rock, electroacoustic music, folk and drone, and with collaborations with artists including Tony Conrad, John Zorn and Merzbow. His festival programme included a live performance and the first screening outside Japan of a documentary on his career by Kazuhiro Shirao.
Haino is also at the centre of ‘Blissful Bun-chan’, an 87-minute film by the Italian duo Invernomuto, Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi, shown at the Tese dei Soppalchi from 16 to 18 October. It records an intimate concert Haino gave in a church near the La Becque Artist Residency on Lake Geneva, in which he appears only as a faint afterimage while the residency’s cat, Phaibun, moves through the space.
The Silver Lion went to the Canadian composer and organist Sarah Davachi, born in Calgary in 1987, whose work combines electronic and acoustic sound and explores timbre and time through long durations, natural tuning and psychoacoustic effects. She is presenting a new work for acoustic ensemble at the festival. Other artists in the programme include Marta De Pascalis, Wyldie Bracewell, Francesco Messina, Alif Hilal, Surgeon and Barbieri herself.
The festival also features projects developed through Biennale College Musica, and its final day brings a second performance of ‘Musica Libera’, a sound installation activated by live performance at the Giudecca penitentiary.
