RAANDOOMINSIDE: ROBOT16
From October 9th to 11th, Bologna hosts the 16th edition of ROBOT Festival: a celebration of electronic experimentation where sound, art, and technology intertwine across the city’s most evocative spaces, inviting audiences to explore new dimensions of listening, dreaming, and collective experience.
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A collective dream set to the sound of rhythms and vibrations is set to take place in Bologna, across venues that transcend shapes and boxes, and you’re invited to close your eyes and let the music and sounds guide you to discover parts of yourself that you’re not allowed to visit and nurture so often.
This collective dream, taking place from October 9th to the 11th, takes its name from ROBOT16: the staple event among music festivals in Bologna, organised by Associazione Culturale Shape, a reference point for electronic music experimentation across its languages and forms, creating a thriving space for those in Italy and the world who want to bring the sounds, silences, lights, and shadows into the waking world.
This year marks the 16th edition of the festival, whose theme, “Dream On”, was introduced in the Manifesto written by Vivien Andrea Naforianu Székely, a young independent researcher, honouring the liberating and utopian power of dreams. “And when the sound will fade away, when we once again call day as what was once a dream, we will know that we will have carried something with us”, recites the manifesto, and the line-up of the festival that will take place across different locations in Bologna promises to fulfil this vision.
The opening night (October 9th) is dedicated to mixed media, where sound meets image, resonating across the screen of a new space of the Festival: Pop Up Cinema Medica 4K. Among the highlights: Lorenzo Senni’s long-awaited Canone Infinito Extended, Sarah Davachi’s organ-only premiere Double Reeds, and Seefeel, legendary British pioneers of post-rock and electronic textures, returning with an audiovisual retrospective of their Warp years.
On October 10th, the dream will drift into the tangible of the Oratorio San Filippo Neri, with performances by Japanese vocal alchemist Hatis Noit and sound artist Felicia Atkinson. Meanwhile, DumBO, the urban regeneration space born from an old freight yard, becomes a sonic playground for rituals fusing the tradition with avangarde: from C’mon Tigre’s intersection of music with robotics and visual arts in LUMINA – Immersive Frequencies, a Technological Dancefloor, to genre-and-border explosive premieres: DJ Haram, Zoë McPherson and Alessandra Leone, Sama’ Abdulhadi, Acid Arab, and Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails) with his Nati Infiniti. While the DJ sets across the premieres will give a dancefloor to dream your desires away.
The final day, October 11th, oscillates between sound research and dialogue. At the Oratorio San Filippo Neri, the collaboration between two major entities, Lino Capra Vaccina and Mai Mai Mai, will share the night with Lucy Railton, unveiling her new experimental project Blue Veils, a spectral dialogue between matter and abstraction. Later at DumBO, performances by The Delay in the Universal Loop, Ela Minus, Rival Consoles, Apparat and Rainy Miller, the exponent of the newly baptised genre “Northern Gothic”, will guide the audience through the closing night’s crescendo, culminating in Crystallmess’s incendiary finale.
ROBOT16 continues to dream aloud and invites everyone to join and listen, whether with your eyes open or not, and let the music talk to your collective unconscious from October 9th to 11th.
