Sergio Ricciardone, the founder and director of the internationally lauded Turin pageant C2C, died yesterday (March 11), the pageant has introduced. No reason for loss of life was given. In an announcement, the pageant provided condolences to his household, including, “Sergio’s imaginative and prescient will proceed to mild our path, his presence will information us in tough instances.” Ricciardone was 53 years outdated.
Within the early 2000s, Ricciardone labored with Roberto Spallacci and Giorgio Valletta to conceptualize a multi-venue pageant that celebrated Turin’s golf equipment and ahead digital music scene. Based as Membership to Membership in 2002, the pageant finally shifted its primary location to Turin’s Lingotto Fiere, a historic web site as soon as heralded as an emblem of Italian futurism. By way of the pageant—which takes place the identical week as Turin’s Artissima up to date artwork truthful—Ricciardone aspired to bridge music and artwork throughout town, notably in an period when digital genres have been probing questions of the physique and identification within the deconstructed techno period. Membership to Membership specialised in hanging visible units, backing repeat headliners like Caribou’s Dan Snaith and Nicolás Jaar with showcases for the likes of Elysia Crampton and pageant home act Arca, who premiered her live-vocal transformation on the 2016 version.
Ricciardone curated the pageant’s viewers as rigorously as his lineups, balancing hedonist and epicurean contingents by revealing sure marquee artists solely after tickets had offered out. He was formidable, guided by a utopian imaginative and prescient for artwork, typically to the purpose of folly. After clipping the pageant’s identify to C2C, he spoke lately of abolishing the title altogether and changing it with an emblem, the ambiguous winged determine that grew to become its brand.
In subsequent years, Ricciardone and creative director Guido Savini shook off C2C’s status for heady digital sounds and branded itself as an avant-pop pageant, as documented in its collection of authentic essays by authors together with Kode9 and Simon Reynolds. Final 12 months’s ever-eclectic invoice featured Hessle Audio, Caroline Polachek, and billy woods; the inaugural New York edition is about to happen in Could, with Oneohtrix Level By no means, Nala Sinephro, Evilgiane, and Two Shell among the many performers.