C2C Festival 2025

C2C Festival is preparing to deliver its largest, most ambitious city-wide programme yet, welcoming over 42,000 attendees to an expanded multi-venue experience across Turin, during Torino Art Week (30 October – 2 November). Having sold out for the fourth consecutive year, the festival continues its ascent as a defining global meeting point for contemporary and experimental music, presenting 68 artists from 21 countries, including 21 Italian exclusives and 7 live debuts.

Under the 2025 theme “Per aspera ad astra” (Through hardship to the stars) — a tribute to founder Sergio Ricciardone — the festival will stretch beyond traditional concert formats, activating performance halls, ballrooms, educational stages, sonic showcases, and public listening formats across the city.

TMLAB x C2C: a transnational curatorial layer powered by facilitation

This year, TMLAB (Transnational Music Lab) will be embedded across the festival, contributing a structured curatorial and artistic facilitation layer focused on emerging curators, cross-border artist collaborations, critical sound dialogues, and site-responsive sonic interventions.

On Thursday 30 October, C2C HQ at Combo will host the TMLAB Curators Showcase, curated by Federico Zonno, selected through the 2024 TMLAB Open Call for Curators. The showcase will feature sets by AMAZON, Not Mass, and Strada, followed by a collective listening format titled “Soundscapes as Resistance”, exploring how sound environments can operate as political, emotional, and cultural acts rather than background texture.

On Friday 31 October, Lingotto Fiere will stage a TMLAB-enabled collaboration between Uruguayan artist Lechuga Zafiro and Turin-based Italian-Colombian experimental duo Tresca y Tigre. The performance will be the result of an intensive pre-festival residency, held in the days leading up to the event, bringing together different musical lineages into a new live-tested sonic formation — aligning with TMLAB’s mission to accelerate transnational sound synergies through facilitation, not prescription.

C2C Talks x TMLAB: curatorial futures, citizenship, and broadcast interventions – Within C2C Talks at Teatro Regio (Friday 31 October), TMLAB will activate:

• Two closed transnational workshops for young curators and artists, focused on curatorial experimentation, festival mediation, and artist development pipelines
• The sonic roundtable “Citizenship Beyond the State”, a discussion exploring diasporic identity, transnational belonging, and the politics of citizenship through sound, curation, and live audio inserts
• Live sound interventions by Radio Banda Larga, operating as micro-broadcast sonic inserts across the festival grounds, reinforcing radio as a curatorial medium rather than supporting infrastructure

TMLAB’s presence at C2C will demonstrate how transnational curatorial facilitation, residency-driven artist collaboration, experimental broadcast formats, and listening ecologies can scale within major festival ecosystems without diluting artistic identity. As the festival unfolds across the city, TMLAB will continue to cultivate cross-border curatorial pathways, new sonic debuts, live-tested collaborations, and critical sound communication formats — reinforcing that the future of festivals lies in enabling frameworks, not fixed narratives.