{"id":7032,"date":"2026-04-02T23:57:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T21:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/?p=7032"},"modified":"2026-04-02T23:57:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T21:57:54","slug":"adventurous-music-documentaries-the-jungle-and-the-spring-festival-before-the-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/adventurous-music-documentaries-the-jungle-and-the-spring-festival-before-the-vote\/","title":{"rendered":"Adventurous music, documentaries, the jungle, and the spring festival before the vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

Film Music Rousseau<\/strong><\/p>\n

17\u201326 APRIL. VISIONS DU R\u00c9EL \/ NYON, SWITZERLAND<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Ukrainian night and a coyote’s coming out<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The Illusion of a Quiet Night” by Ukrainian director Olga Chernykh was shot in a single night in July 2025 by forty directors and hundreds of Ukrainians. It paints a collective fresco of a country at war: fear, exhaustion, joy and life. She writes on Instagram: “I wanted to make a luminous film about the night in Ukraine to show that, whatever happens, light will triumph over darkness.” The film will have its world premiere at the Swiss documentary festival Visions du R\u00e9el. The program is broad \u2014 164 films from 75 countries \u2014 and organized around thematic strands: Family Novels, The Turbulence of Love, The Dust of Empires, Back to the Future, and Confronting Leviathan, focused on films that portray authoritarian regimes. A retrospective is dedicated to Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, who will also present his new short film “Campo Marzio,” about the Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, where the people who fought the city’s invaders across the centuries lie at rest. Shifting register entirely, another strand is devoted to Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani, who went viral posting shorts featuring two anthropomorphic lizards in a hollowed-out, hysterical New York during the pandemic. She will bring her latest film, “Bouchra,” about a lesbian coyote director who must come out to her mother.<\/p>\n

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15 APRIL\u201323 AUGUST. MARINA ABRAMOVI\u0106: BALKAN EROTIC EPIC \/ BERLIN, GERMANY<\/strong><\/p>\n

A return to Serbian roots, through eroticism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marina Abramovi\u0107 is one of the most celebrated \u2014 and most intense \u2014 figures in contemporary art. Her latest work, which she herself describes as her most ambitious, is Balkan Erotic Epic. Marking the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele, it comes to Berlin in two stages: an exhibition at the Gropius Bau, on view from April, with video installations and sculptures, and a performance in October at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele \u2014 the world premiere took place in Manchester last autumn. Abramovi\u0107 returns to her Serbian roots \u2014 partly, she has said, to free herself from her mother \u2014 exploring eroticism as a primal energy. Eroticism \u2014 “the only energy we have; we can use it for creativity, for spiritual purposes, or it becomes aggression, war, rage” \u2014 is a bridge between life and death, a channel of connection with the universe and the originary source of existence. This monumental performance lasts four hours and involves seventy musicians, dancers and singers, who give form to erotic rituals drawn from Balkan folk tradition. It channels a powerful flow of feminine energy, primordial and apotropaic rites \u2014 such as running naked or massaging the breasts \u2014 to confront death, ensure fertility and restore balance with nature. The Gropius Bau exhibition brings together historical and recent works: Abramovi\u0107 has been exploring the Balkans for decades, traveling through a Serbia scarred by war. In “Balkan Baroque” (1997), for instance, the artist sat atop a mountain of blood and animal remains while intoning traditional Serbian elegies.<\/p>\n

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1\u201312 APRIL. BART\u00d3K SPRING INTERNATIONAL ART WEEKS \/ BUDAPEST, HUNGARY<\/strong><\/p>\n

The spring festival \u2014 and then to the polls, in Budapest<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Hungarian composer and pianist B\u00e9la Bart\u00f3k was so fascinated by the musical traditions of his country that he would often travel through rural Hungary and neighboring lands, in the company of his friend and fellow composer Zolt\u00e1n Kod\u00e1ly, to collect and transcribe traditional songs and melodies. These recordings \u2014 what today would be called field recordings \u2014 formed the basis of much of his work, from piano sonatas to symphonies, rhapsodies and cantatas. In the eclectic spirit of the composer, the program of the new edition of the Bart\u00f3k Spring International Arts Week in Budapest celebrates Bart\u00f3k’s creativity and vision across a range of musical genres and artistic languages: from “Sinbad,” the first Arabic opera (from Oman) in a co-production involving Csaba K\u00e1el and Egyptian conductor Gabr Histam and librettist Nader Salah El-Din, to the dance of “Full Moon,” one of the last works by choreographer Pina Bausch; from the jazz of saxophonist Chris Potter to the folk of M\u00e1rta Sebesty\u00e9n, one of the country’s most beloved singers, performing alongside harpsichordist Judit Andrejszki. Some are hoping this music will inspire Hungarians ahead of the presidential elections on April 12th, where Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n \u2014 after sixteen years in power \u2014 is playing for his political future (and, given his vetoes, so are the rest of us Europeans).<\/p>\n

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10\u201325 APRIL. SALVAJES, SILVESTRES Y ESPONT\u00c1NEAS \/ MADRID, SPAIN<\/strong><\/p>\n

The nature that grows wild in the city<\/strong><\/p>\n

The former Roman duo Franco 126 and Carl Brave sang of “flowers grown up through the cobblestones” \u2014 and beyond the Roman evocation, there is a genuine emotion stirred by the irrepressibility of nature, which keeps being born, reborn, existing while we continue to spread layer upon layer of concrete. The festival “Salvajes, silvestres y espont\u00e1neas” at La Casa Encendida in Madrid is dedicated precisely to the city’s spontaneous flora, focusing on the most overlooked and misunderstood natural life in the environments we inhabit. The event, coordinated by Alberto Peralta, one of the founders of Madrid’s community urban garden network, aims to provide tools for recognizing its value and potential \u2014 value that is often invisible to an overly urbanized gaze. The manifesto reads: “What is unknown goes unnoticed; what is unnamed ends up at the margins of language, almost impossible to express.” This year’s edition looks at innovative and unconventional neighborhood gardening practices, emphasizing knowledge and hands-on engagement. The program includes meetings with collectives, professionals and artists, workshops on soil and its microbial life, short films devoted to lichens, and walks to learn to identify wild plants and their possible ethnobotanical and culinary uses \u2014 what in hipster parlance translates as “urban foraging.”<\/p>\n

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23\u201326 APRIL. ART BRUSSELS \/ BRUSSELS, BELGIUM<\/strong><\/p>\n

A reliable destination for discovering new European artists<\/strong><\/p>\n

Art Brussels is one of Europe’s longest-running (since 1968) and most important contemporary art fairs. It is known as the premier occasion for discovering new talent: galleries give substantial space to the work of emerging international artists who can prove revelatory for collectors. Complementing the main fair \u2014 with over 150 galleries and more than 800 artists \u2014 conversations, performances and installations extend across the city through an off-program, in which museums, galleries, foundations and private collections all add their voice. One highlight: at the Bozar gallery, “Beauty Through a Contemporary Lens” opens, an exhibition exploring beauty and how art describes and challenges the norms of what is considered beautiful, from Botticelli to video games.<\/p>\n

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23\u201326 APRIL. ABEL SELAOCOE \/ LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abel’s progressive tradition at the Barbican<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abel Selaocoe, South African musician, singer and composer, has invented a musical genre of his own. Its elements are: the cello (he trained at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester), traditional South African melodies, percussion and Xhosa guttural singing \u2014 the Xhosa are a Bantu-speaking people, the second largest linguistic group in South Africa, whose language is characterized by click sounds. He blends Baroque music with township rhythms \u2014 rhythms born in the informal settlements of the apartheid era \u2014 groove and ancestral chant. He himself has described his musical research as a “progressive tradition,” one in which he grafts vocal improvisations, with an orchestra or alone, onto works by Bach and others. At the Barbican Centre he will appear among the guests of the Mohopolo\/Ancestral Memory Weekend, a celebration of South African music and culture: a space devoted to Bantu tradition for talking about community, passing down stories and memory, and commemorating both the Anglo-Zulu colonial war and the struggle against apartheid. And for discovering the music of South Africa, which ranges from traditional Zulu music to afro-psychedelic future pop, afrorave, contemporary jazz and amapiano \u2014 a subgenre of house music.<\/p>\n

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4\u20135 APRIL. OPEN HOUSE ATHENS \/ ATHENS, GREECE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Permission to peek inside other people’s homes<\/strong><\/p>\n

To get a sense of a city, you can climb to a vantage point and take in its geography \u2014 trace its arteries, orient yourself within the boundaries of its neighborhoods, pick out its landmarks. Or you can move through the city differently, peering into courtyards, following instinct and the profiles of buildings. How many times, stepping into an entrance hall or glimpsing a ceiling through a window, have you been seized by the urge to go and snoop around other people’s homes? Open House is the international format in which, for one weekend, many cities open to the public \u2014 free of charge \u2014 the homes of others and much more: public and private spaces normally off-limits that transform the city into a diffuse museum. An event designed to bring the public closer to architecture and design. This weekend it is the turn of Open House Athens. Visitors will be able to explore museums, studios, offices, banks, repurposed industrial spaces, hotels, deconsecrated churches turned cultural centers \u2014 and above all, of course, private apartments and homes. It is the weekend when one is permitted to be shamelessly nosy: to see which books are on other people’s shelves and what shade of white is on their walls. In addition, last weekend the “Made in Athens” showcase, part of the program, opened more than 30 creative studios belonging to designers, artists, ceramicists and upholsterers \u2014 a micro design week.<\/p>\n

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8\u201319 APRIL. KADDISH, LA FEMME CHAUVE EN PEIGNOIR ROUGE \/ SAINT-DENIS, FRANCE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kert\u00e9sz’s literature as a lens on the present<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I have the impression that, in reflecting on the traumatic effect of Auschwitz, I touch on the fundamental questions of human vitality and creativity; and thinking about Auschwitz in this way, paradoxically perhaps, I think more about the future than the past,” said the Hungarian Jewish writer Imre Kert\u00e9sz in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2002. A survivor of the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Zeitz and Buchenwald, he recounted his experience above all in “Fatelessness.” Kert\u00e9sz’s work is examined by French author and director Margaux Eskenazi in the piece “Kaddish, La femme chauve en peignoir rouge,” on stage at the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre G\u00e9rard Philipe in Saint-Denis from April 8th to 19th \u2014 without translating the full title, Kaddish in Hebrew is a prayer of praise to God, also used as a funeral chant. With a theatrical language that blends literature, testimony, music and political questions, the work interrogates the role of memory and how it shapes our present. Moving through Kert\u00e9sz’s writing, it is deployed as a lens for examining urgent themes such as racism, antisemitism and totalitarianism \u2014 drawing on the experience and testimony of the past, but so that they may help orient us toward tomorrow, precisely as Kert\u00e9sz intended.<\/p>\n

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5 MARCH\u201320 JULY. HENRI ROUSSEAU: L’AMBITION DE LA PEINTURE \/ PARIS, FRANCE<\/strong><\/p>\n

A jungle painted for the end of a friendship<\/strong><\/p>\n

The effects of certain relationships reverberate long through time. Such is the case with the friendship between Paul Guillaume \u2014 art dealer and gallerist, introduced to the Parisian avant-garde circles of the early twentieth century by Apollinaire \u2014 and American collector Albert Barnes, for whom Guillaume acted as intermediary, helping him acquire eighteen paintings by Henri Rousseau, an artist who saw no success in his lifetime \u2014 too na\u00eff, they said. Today Barnes’s collection is held at the eponymous Foundation in Philadelphia, while Guillaume’s forms the heart of the Mus\u00e9e de l’Orangerie in Paris. From the union of the two institutions was born the monographic exhibition “Henri Rousseau: Painting as Ambition” at the Orangerie. Around fifty works are on display, some on loan from other European and American institutions, including “The Sleeping Gypsy” from MoMA in New York. The exhibition also explores Rousseau’s creative process, offering the chance to examine the material characteristics of his works and to place them in the context of the modern art market, to which Guillaume and Barnes contributed greatly. To revisit today a collaboration, even just an anecdote or an episode from a fruitful friendship between the two sides of the Atlantic, carries with it a veil of nostalgia, as though that kind of understanding already belonged, in some way, to another time. We console ourselves with Rousseau’s gentle, luxuriant jungles which, far from na\u00efve, speak to the heart in a suspended and silent language where the exotic element is more dreamed than real.<\/p>\n

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9\u201312 APRIL. REWIRE \/ THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS<\/strong><\/p>\n

The festival of adventurous music<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rewire, in The Hague, is an “international festival for adventurous music.” We approach it in a spirit of adventure, scrolling through a lineup of names that look like random strings of characters (XTC in the XIV, or Yb3L), and set off to explore. We begin with cellist Violeta Garc\u00eda and discover that she fuses electronic scratches with the deep tones of her instrument. We then pluck up courage and land on Sombat Simla, a Thai musician and the greatest living player of the khene \u2014 a bamboo mouth organ from Southeast Asia. One final discovery: Kee Avil, a Canadian artist releasing a “deconstructed” album one track at a time throughout 2026. And one could carry on like this through the remaining 143 artists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Film Music Rousseau 17\u201326 APRIL. VISIONS DU R\u00c9EL \/ NYON, SWITZERLAND The Ukrainian night and a coyote’s coming out “The Illusion of a Quiet Night” by Ukrainian director Olga Chernykh was shot in a single night in July 2025 by forty directors and hundreds of Ukrainians. It paints a collective fresco of a country at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7131,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7032"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7133,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032\/revisions\/7133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}