C0C The Festival as Performance : an interview with Club to Club founder Sergio Ricciardone
Sergio Ricciardone
Being Club to Club’s 20th anniversary, this year should have been big but alas you too have had to postpone major celebrations and adapt for this year, could you us about C0C (CZEROC)?
These uncertain times revealed two trends in the art’s practices: the celebration of the collapse or the exploration of a new possible contemporary utopia. This last one is the option we’ve chosen to follow, building up a hybrid programme and reaching different fruitions depending on the artistic gestures. A project that is going to be a new standard for us, designed to not be exhausted after this year and this intense period.
How has this situation helped you think out of the box and do these adjustments have the potential to better things for the festival in years to come?
Paradoxically, the current situation has pushed us to increase the artistic and curation experimentation. Bearing in mind the ever-changing context, we worked on special shows and performances, which are in the most cases site-specific, able to keep their output effective both live and digitally.
Could you tell us about the choice of locations and the process behind the choice of artists this year?
The opportunity to work on ad-hoc projects revealed itself when we decided to involve the local scene and community. Over the time we had constantly investigated and supported the new national artistic creativity — not just during the festival, but throughout the whole year with specific formats like The Italian New Wave. Thus, it came naturally to work closely with the artists in new and original productions. As for the venues, we choose some key locations of our history, which have always been up to new challenges: Teatro Carignano used to be the venue of the Thursday’s night at the festival, always featuring very special performances (Kode9 plays Burial, Jeff Mills & Claudio Sinatti, etc) and OGR has been —and still is— our partner in many great productions, often starting from zero.
How did Club to Club come about and what is your most memorable club to club moment to date?
There are quite a lot of memorable moments – Nicolas Jaar playing Battiato, Aphex Twin, the 8 shows of Kraftwerk’s 3D Catalogue, to name a few… But if I had to pick one i’d choose definitely Franco Battiato and its sperimental show at C2C14. 2024 was also a turning point for C2C’s history: we started to play with the big boys, taking our avant-pop programming on a new level.
What is it about Turin? What makes it the ideal location for Club to Club, as opposed to somewhere like Milan?
Every festival has to be ‘organic’ in relation to its territory, not a foreign body: C2C is intrinsically linked to Torino and the city has been a perfect hub for our festival to grow. We’ve always meant to depict the important vocation of Torino to innovation and postmodernism through the three souls of the city: the baroque one, the industrial one and the contemporary one.
Milano, however, plays a vital role for the festival (25% of the audience of 2019’s edition of C2C was from Milan) and I also think we will increasingly see Torino and Milano as a macro-city in the near future.
Could you give our readers some tips of what to do with 24hrs in Turin?
Go to Scannabue: it’s the city’s food and wine mainstay! And then visit the little and historical cafés outside the city center.
