Caterina Barbieri appointed director of Biennale Musica Venezia

Caterina Barbieri, a 34-year-old Italian electroacoustic musician and composer based in Berlin, has been named the new director of the Biennale Musica di Venezia for the 2025/2026 biennium. The appointment follows the festival's 2023 shift toward electronic music, marking a departure from its historical focus on classical and contemporary works. Barbieri, born in Bologna in 1990, has performed at major festivals including Unsound, Primavera Sound, and Sonar, and has released eight albums. In 2021, she founded the independent label light-years, curating showcases at institutions such as Centre Pompidou, Berlin Atonal, and Southbank Centre. Her music, described by Pitchfork as "a mind-altering journey" and "a dreammachine for the ears," employs modular synthesizers from vintage Buchla to Eurorack systems to explore psychedelic potential through generative computation. Her research investigates the relationship between technology and creativity, memory, perception, and altered states of consciousness. She contributed to the Italian Pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, working with artist Massimo Bartolini alongside Kali Malone and Gavin Bryars. Barbieri stated, "Venice never ceases to inspire me: its mutability, echoes and reflections, its silences and liminality. Its resilience and desire for infinity. Its dissolving of space and time. All of this is already music."