Cave12
Sanatorium of Sound is pleased to collaborate with Cave12, one of Europe’s most important venues dedicated to experimental music, whose programme is curated by Marion Innocenzi and Fernando Sixto. For this edition of the festival, they are curating and supporting the participation of Switzerland-based artists, Aya Metwalli and Nur, bringing their long-standing experience and perspective on contemporary experimental music.
Cave12 is a venue based in Geneva, founded in 1989. From its inception, Cave12 has focused its curatorial programme on less represented musical approaches, particularly experimental ones. It soon became an international point of reference, welcoming musicians from New York to Japan.
After facing eviction in 2007, Cave12 relocated to a new space dedicated to its activities in 2013. More than a concert venue, Cave12 is a space for artistic research, open to practices that explore and challenge the physical properties of sound — from acoustic formations and mixed-media performances to various forms of amplification, electroacoustic projects, and amplified electronic or instrumental music. All of this unfolds without aesthetic boundaries, embracing both explosive free-punk energy and reductionist, meditative approaches.
Here, audiences encounter practices that expand the sonic possibilities of instruments, question the notions of silence and noise, composition and improvisation, and investigate traditions alongside the transmission of artistic knowledge as an essential part of the continued evolution of musical language. Its programme reflects the diversity of today’s experimental music, encompassing electronic music, contemporary composition, punk, folk, drone, psychedelic music, hip-hop and many other forms.
Cave12 is among the few venues in Europe maintaining a year-round programme dedicated to experimental music, presenting between ten and fifteen events each month. Its ongoing commitment to understanding and supporting artists’ practices, and to providing the conditions necessary for the sonic realisation of their work, has earned Cave12 an international reputation as one of the key stages for contemporary musical experimentation.
Marion Innocenzi:
“What do we want for performance venues? Certainly, freedom and madness! Freedom of the mind and madness of ideas. Freedom to use all spaces, any place, without the administration playing the role of party pooper. Architects! Envision the wildest stages, convert apartments into theaters, close streets for concerts, forget that there is an order that distinguishes the official from the marginal because the creation of a marginal theater in an ideal society should be anything but official.”
Christian Dupavillon – “The Places of Entertainment”, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, no. 199, October 1978, p. 1.
