Wissal Houbabi, Giulia Martini, Francesco Lurgo
Città Aperta - Finis Mundi
EVENT
16 November 2024
We look forward to seeing you on Saturday 16 November for Finis Mundi, the last event of Città Aperta, the series of thematic encounters between music and poetry that over the past two years has sought to investigate the ‘civil landscapes’ of contemporaneity.
Finis Mundi aims to interrogate the transition periods between the collapse of one world and the birth of another, proposing endings - of horizons, projects, expectations, systems and ecologies - not only as catastrophes, but also as possibilities for new beginnings.
The encounter crosses the sharp, narrative voice of writer and activist Wissal Houbabi with Giulia Martini's verses, characterised by an ironic and generative nostalgia, and with the evocative sounds of electronic composer Francesco Lurgo.
Wissal Houbabi moves in various fields, from researching hip hop feminism to writing short stories that explore the condition of diasporic culture. She is a performance poet, an experimental field in which she tries to break the links between linguistics and poetic language, using words as clay and questioning the relationship between languages and dialects, between sound and meaning. She has realised workshops, courses, poetry projects with various cultural and artistic institutions, including Iuav, Goethe-Institut, Museo delle Civiltà, MUDEC. Among her works: La Madelaine de Proust - La Vache qui Rit, published in Visible: Art as Policies for Care. Socially Engaged Art (2010-Ongoing); Una gran puzza di merda nell'aria, presented at the Milano Re-Mapped Summer Festival, the Compraverde 23 and the XV Abba Cup; Attitudine. Anatomia di un occhio tagliato (Einaudi, 2023); phonomuseum_rome at Museo delle Civiltà; Offesissima at Ar/ge Kunst Bolzano; Spore - tenerezza radicale at Le Serre in Bologna, a summer festival of events highlighting diaspora cultures.
Francesco Lurgo, a musician and composer originally from Turin and based in Milan, after years of performing on numerous Italian and European club and festival stages with numerous projects such as the FLeUR duo, the Tacuma Electronic Orchestra collective and Italian underground veterans like Daniele Brusaschetto, made his solo debut in 2022 with Sleep Together Folded Like Origami and in September 2024 he returns with The Gentle Whale published by the historic Silentes label. Hers is an iridescent sound that undulates in continuous ups and downs between an ambient intimacy and maximalist saturations, equally at ease with post-rock school guitars and synths that deconstruct IDM, never forgetting neither a great admiration for the world of contemporary soundtracks nor the love for melody that always remains the founding element of his tracks.
Giulia Martini was born in Pistoia and lives in Florence, where she graduated in Contemporary Italian Literature with a thesis on Patrizia Cavalli's Pigre divinità e pigra sorte. She obtained a doctorate in Philology and Criticism at the University of Siena, with a research project dedicated to dialogue in poetry, Le forme del dialogo nella poesia italiana del Novecento (supervisor Prof. Niccolò Scaffai). She has spoken as a speaker at numerous conferences and seminars of a literary nature. In June 2018, she published, for Interno Poesia, the collection Coppie minime (Ceppo Under 35 Prize) and, in 2024, Tresor. Also for Interno Poesia, he edited the anthology Poeti italiani nati negli anni ‘80 e ’90, in three volumes. Her poems have appeared in various magazines (including ‘Poesia’, ‘Gradiva’, ‘Paragone’) and anthologies. He conceived and led the artistic direction of Trovare chiuso. Poeti per il Teatro Rossi Aperto di Pisa (1st ed. June 2019), a festival focused on relating literature to certain social dynamics of contemporary society.