Elia Moretti

Elia Moretti is an Italian composer, performer, percussionist, and researcher working at the intersection of sound, performance, and socially engaged artistic practice. His work focuses on the performativity of sound and on listening understood not as passive reception, but as a relational practice, a critical tool, and a mode of engaging with the world. Trained as a percussionist while also grounded in the social sciences, he has developed an interdisciplinary practice situated between composition, music theatre, sound art, and artistic research.

Central to his work is the question of how sound emerges within specific social and spatial contexts, and how it shapes experiences of place, community, and presence. Moretti approaches listening as a process capable of revealing the social, political, and territorial dimensions of reality. His projects frequently evolve through participatory formats, fieldwork, and long-term research, treating sound not as an autonomous aesthetic object but as a medium for building relationships and critically engaging with places, histories, and communities.

He is a co-founder of Ferst Dadler, a performance collective developing collaborative formats that activate public space through sound, movement, objects, and participatory dramaturgies. He has composed music for radio, theatre, and dance, collaborating with artists and institutions across Italy, France, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Serbia. His curatorial work includes co-creating the Carpathian New Wave series in Prešov, the Hear Me! festival, and the EARDAY programme presented in Prague and rural regions of the Czech Republic.

As a performer, he has collaborated with contemporary and improvised music ensembles including New Made Ensemble, MI-65, Klang Systematiek, Prague Music Performance Orchestra, and Pražský Improvizační Orchestra. He is also the author of award-winning radio works, including Republika Zahradní (Prix Italia 2025) and Once Enea Stuck an Apple Seed in My Ear (Phonurgia Nova 2022, Palma Ars Acustica 2022), as well as the album Symposium Musicum, the outcome of a long-term artistic experiment and socially engaged sound practice developed in the Carpathian region.

Ethnomusicological research conducted in the Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia, together with theoretical reflection on sound and music theatre, forms an important part of his practice. He is currently completing a PhD at Charles University in Prague and is a co-creator of the Creative Europe project Listening as Method (2025–2027), which investigates listening as an epistemic, social, and political practice.