PF◯◯ Piedicavallo Festival © 2026 ⬤ sorgenti
The 2026 edition of the Piedicavallo Festival, titled sorgenti (Sources), concludes a three-year journey that opened with an exploration of the Mappature (Mappings, 2024) of the Territory: not geographical maps, but affective ones, rooted in the atmospheres of visited places. What is the essence of the places the Festival inhabits? Which atmospheric and affective elements contribute to their identity?
In this process of questioning, the theme of Convivenze (Coexistences, 2025) naturally followed as a foundational element: a space for the coexistence of human and non-human subjects, a condition that integrates the intrinsic gap between closeness and distance, a concrete trace that overwrites geographical maps with the counter-mappings at the heart of this research.
How do we stay together?
With Sorgenti, Piedicavallo Festival brings play into action as a strategy for coexistence. Much like water springing from the subsoil and shaping the composition of every element it touches, play—like a surging flow—shapes our capacity to understand, question, and engage with one another. Play is evoked here as a device for collective composition, a generator of extemporaneous vocabularies and grammars, networks of imaginaries through which to experience the Territory. It is an interval where rule and uncertainty transform into invention. A generative conflict that defuses and disarms the present, successfully building bridges between generations, alterities, and opposing shores. It is precisely within the radical proximity of coexistences—a continuous negotiation and rewriting of geographies and relationships—that play shapes itself as a necessary exercise to approach reality from an unusual posture.
This edition chooses to celebrate play as a tool and a key. For years, its potential has allowed for the weaving of tight bonds between Sotterranea and the valley community; it points toward a mode of relating, and stands as a source to return to in order to understand oneself. Piedicavallo Festival continues to unfold across two distinct sections:
sarv: The historic showcase dedicated to classical and chamber music, diffused throughout the Alta Valle Cervo. From August 1st to 14th, sarv develops through a widespread program of concerts, workshops, and traveling musical performances, inviting the audience to traverse and listen to the spaces of the Upper Valley, letting themselves be cradled by the flow of artistic interventions.
lüria: A space-time of sonic and performative experimentation in the village of Piedicavallo. Over three intense days, from August 21st to 23rd, lüria inhabits the village with a dense program of live sets, DJ sets, performative interventions, walks, experimental cinema screenings, and workshops, alongside installations and devices that invite collective audience participation.
The composition of the program temporarily reconfigures the space and time of the Village—much like the goddess-demon of local legends from whom the section takes its name, who emerges from the flooding waters of the Cervo torrent.
