Thesis title: ARCHITETTURA DELLA FESTA Pratiche di rilettura spaziale e rigenerazione territoriale nei festival di musica elettronica europei
The festival, understood as a “suspension of historical time”¹, represents a subversion of everyday order and an expression of human society in all its forms. Alongside other rituals, it constitutes an essential element for both the community and the individual.
The festival creates a parenthesis within ordinary time and, in order to manifest itself, imprints upon space characteristics that destabilize its fixed nature. This subversion occurs through the inversion of the functionality of spatial elements and the transformation of their meaning: a tent may become a wall, a beam of light may turn into a room, a wooden arch may function as a pillar, and so on.
Being ephemeral and not projected into the future, the festival embeds itself within an existing site—natural, urban, or archaeological—and transforms it.
The festive setting transports participants into an “other space,” detached from the physicality and temporality of the everyday environment. The festive act is grounded in a subversion of both social relations and spatial configurations: space, conceived as a continuum linked to ordinary functionality, is overturned and re-signified.
Within this process, the festival generates a true “festive machine”² that occupies a site for a limited duration, suspending the spatial and value-based relations that define its everyday use.
Since the earliest forms of community, the festival has been a fundamental practice of human society. Within this framework, the relationship between community and place constitutes the core of this research, which focuses on how new communities inhabit spaces neglected by contemporary Western society through the ritual of celebration.
In particular, the music festival— a phenomenon with approximately sixty years of history—emerges as a paradigmatic case. This type of event operates along a spectrum between legality and illegality, secrecy and explicitness, legitimacy and illegitimacy, relying on a prefigurative approach that, in some contexts, tends toward utopianism—as in Temporary Autonomous Zones³—while in others it intertwines with the narrative of reality.
The space occupied by such festivals is reinterpreted according to context, shaped by social relations that, freed from the structure of everyday time, redesign alternative spatial configurations and dynamics, as well as by the performative aspects carried by electronic music—the central subject of these events.
Over the past thirty years, electronic music festivals have become increasingly significant design phenomena, intersecting with urban issues—given their frequent location in marginal or residual spaces—as well as with architectural, ecological, and social concerns.
Their temporary nature, ease of assembly and disassembly, the development of complex organizational systems, site-specific installations, and the relationship with music not only as an immaterial element but also as a spatial one—enhanced through dance—make these events complex scenarios in which participants are both users and protagonists, and where a prefigurative practice of the future can emerge.
This research situates itself at the intersection of scenography and festivity—fields that have always been intertwined: the former is fundamental in defining and making perceptible the “other space” generated by the latter.
In particular, the study investigates how and why the electronic music festival today represents an urban practice capable of enhancing, creating, and reactivating fragments of the city or territory, proposing alternative spatial systems and new forms of collective aggregation.