INTERSCAPE represents the final outcome of INPA – International Network of the Polytechnics of the Arts, a wide-ranging initiative funded by the European Union under NextGenerationEU (PNRR) and coordinated by the Politecnico delle Arti di Bergamo.
The project is built upon a solid academic network involving the collaboration of several national Higher Institutes for Artistic and Musical Education: Accademia di Belle Arti, Conservatorio di Musica «Luigi Cherubini» and ISIA Design di Firenze; Accademia di Belle Arti «Albertina» and Conservatorio Statale di Musica «Giuseppe Verdi» di Torino; Accademia di Belle Arti and Conservatorio di Musica «G. Verdi» di Ravenna; Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti di Genova. This collaboration extended to leading international partners, including the Universidad de Granada, Escuela Universitaria de Artes TAI Madrid, Hochschule Luzern (HSLU), and Academy of Arts Novi Sad.
The process has been structured into five methodological phases: →︎ preliminary theoretical research, the →︎ international Summer School (July 2025), the →︎ Autumn School (October 2025), followed in the months thereafter by the production of works through individual consultations with students, the final public presentation as part of →︎ TONO Festival 2026, and the publication of this website documenting the outcomes.
The project involved almost a hundred people among students, professors and researchers, benefiting from the supervision of renowned visiting professors such as Brandon LaBelle, José Manuel López López, Fabian Panisello, and Stefano Romano. The entire project adopted a practice-based research approach, in which artistic practice and creative production were utilized as primary tools of inquiry to generate new theoretical and critical knowledge.
The INTERSCAPE project offers a reflection on the contemporary landscape through the practice of interdisciplinarity. At its centre lies a conception of landscape as relation — not an objective given, but something that emerges from the relationship between humanity and environment, following Augustin Berque's theory of «trajectivity» (2008). The →︎ projects that emerged from this approach explore how sound and image can meet and merge into complex perceptual spaces, in line with the «post-medium condition» described by Rosalind Krauss (1999), in which the hybridisation of languages can generate an unprecedented form of knowledge. The viewer is not a recipient but a participant: listening and seeing merge into a phenomenology of experience in which landscape emerges as a field of tensions — between memory and transformation, nature and artifice, humanity and territory. What unites the various works is an attention to process rather than outcome, to the construction of perceptual devices rather than the production of self-contained objects. Landscape thus becomes a shared field of inquiry: a terrain in which the specific competencies of each discipline serve a form of knowledge that can only emerge from the encounter between the senses and the real.
Landscape was taken up as an object of inquiry across its many dimensions: sonic, visual, anthropic, natural, historical and future-facing. The research unfolded along three thematic axes: Scopic/Soundscape (the relationship between sound and image), Uncontaminated/Urban (the relationship between nature and city), and Historyscape/Futurscape (historical stratification and possible evolutions). Each axis formed the working field of an interdisciplinary research group, made up of faculty and researchers from the Italian partner institutions, which in spring–summer 2025 produced a theoretical position paper — comprising a state-of-the-art essay and an annotated bibliography — forming the conceptual foundation for all subsequent phases of the project.
Landscape today constitutes a genuine semantic battlefield, a point of intersection where ecology, sociology and technology converge, demanding a radical redefinition of humanity's position in the world.
→︎ Scopic/Soundscape investigates the move beyond the primacy of sight in favour of a multisensory perception. While the image tends to distance the observer from the subject, sound envelops it, turning landscape into an immersive, relational experience. The identity of a place is thus reshaped by acoustic pollution or by silence, defining a sound ecology in which sound acts as an indicator of an ecosystem's health. Raymond Murray Schafer (1977) systematised the concept of the soundscape, developing a theory of acoustic ecology in which the sonic landscape constitutes a field of relations between humanity, sound and environment. This relational dimension does not concern only the landscape as lived, but extends to its representation: Michel Chion (1990) showed how, in audiovisual experience, sound does not merely accompany image but radically transforms its perception through the mechanism of synchresis and the so-called «added value». Scopic/Soundscape inhabits precisely this threshold — between the soundscape as ecological reality and sound as a tool of perceptual and representational construction.
Alfonso Alberti, Marco Ligabue, Giulia Mengozzi, Roberto Neri, Umberto Pedraglio, Pasquale Savignano, Gabriella Sborgi
→︎ Uncontaminated/Urban explores the porousness of the boundary between the anthropised environment and what we often simplistically define as «uncontaminated» nature. In the age of the Anthropocene, the idea of a wild nature reveals itself to be a mere cultural construct: the urban landscape is not its antithesis, but a modified form of it. It becomes necessary, then, to shift our gaze — as Gilles Clément suggests in his Manifesto of the Third Landscape (2004) — towards abandoned areas, urban interstices, roadside margins: spaces that escape human management and become privileged sites of biodiversity and ecological resistance precisely because they fall into neither category, neither 'nature' nor 'city'. This reconfiguration of the gaze also implies a more radical critique, however: as long as we continue to think of nature as a sublime elsewhere to be preserved — what Timothy Morton calls ecomimesis — we risk hindering ecological thought rather than nourishing it (2007). Uncontaminated/Urban takes on both challenges: broadening the field of what we consider ecologically relevant, and deconstructing the aesthetic categories that limit our perception of it.
Veronica Caciolli, Pietro Millefiore, Alessandra Pioselli, Anna Maria Storace, Gianmario Strappati, Marco Tognetti
→︎ Historyscape/Futurscape interprets landscape as a palimpsest, where the historical dimension is not a static museum but a living organism in constant becoming. The challenge of Futurscape lies in resilience: how will our territories evolve in the face of the climate crisis? The reflection turns to the transformative capacity of historical stratification: will our ruins become the spectres of a lost past, or the seeds of a new evolution? Marc Augé warns that the hypermodern present produces only rubble — fragments that no longer have time to settle into ruins, to become history (2003). It is precisely against this erosion of temporal depth that Historyscape/Futurscape positions itself: restoring to landscape its stratification as a condition of possibility for imagining the future.
Marina Brancato, Giuseppe Previtali, Stefano Romano
The interweaving of these three axes reveals that landscape is not an object to be observed, but a relational process in constant tension. To inhabit landscape today means being able to read the traces of the past not as constraints, but as foundations for a resilient future practice. Only through a vision capable of integrating the acoustic dimension with the urban and the historical is it possible to heal the rift between humanity and environment, transforming territory from a mere backdrop into a conscious space of coexistence.
The exhibition design, curated by Bianca Trevisan and Daniele Maffeis with musical programming by Umberto Pedraglio, was conceived so that the exhibition and the performative moment would not be kept separate, but would generate an immersive environment in which visual installation and sound performance could coexist. The exhibition was spread across GAMeC — Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (Spazio Zero), Palazzo della Libertà, and the Accademia di Belle Arti Giacomo Carrara, which in particular hosted the performance of newly composed works by INTERSCAPE students, conducted by Maestro Fabian Panisello.
The →︎ thirty-one projects show diverse approaches to the theme of landscape, developed through a constant interaction between visual and sonic dimensions. The defining feature lies in the method adopted: musicians and visual artists worked in synergy from the earliest stages, giving rise to works in which the two components grew in parallel and interdependently. In this context, interdisciplinarity is not a simple juxtaposition of languages, but a genuine integration of practices and skills branching into multiple paths of inquiry. The neologism INTERSCAPE in the title was born from the fusion of landscape, interdisciplinarity and an international dimension: a synthesis reflecting an openness towards new creative and geographical horizons.
A significant part of the research focuses on landscape as an inner construction, where memory becomes a perceptual space explored through transparent materials and sound compositions evoking fragments and dissolves. Domestic architecture becomes a metaphor for emotional states — recalling Gaston Bachelard's account, in The Poetics of Space (1957), of the house as guardian of dreams — while sound works on amplified silences to render audible the very process of remembering.
The analysis then moves towards the urban landscape understood as a palimpsest: some projects reread specific sites in Bergamo through installations that invite a layered reading of the territory, where the city is not a backdrop but sedimented memory, an «urban fact», in Aldo Rossi's terms (1966). The relationship with the natural environment, meanwhile, is explored by taking ecosystems such as forests or cellular forms as models of complex organisation: through granular synthesis and field recordings, the projects interrogate the tension between human control and spontaneous transformation, working with and on the soundscape as a field of relations to be listened to (Murray Schafer, 1977). The temporal dimension emerges as a transversal axis: time is treated as expressive matter, made manifest through processes of erosion and luminous loops that evoke the inevitability of natural cycles and the decay of matter.
The inquiry could not overlook political memory and the ideological inscription of space. By interrogating Fascist-era architecture and the symbols of power, some works render perceptible the forms of control sedimented within urban structures. From this perspective, the sonic dimension acts as sonic agency (Brandon LaBelle, 2006, 2018), able to infiltrate the fabric of urban planning to negotiate the boundaries between public and private and give voice to submerged social tensions. The projects bring to light what processes of normalisation tend to render invisible, restoring to art its function of deconstructing reality and of acoustically reclaiming collective places.
Bianca Trevisan and Daniele Maffeis
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M. Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994 (orig. ed. 1990).
G. Clément, Manifesto of the Third Landscape, 2004, orig. ed. Manifeste du Tiers paysage, Paris, Éditions Sujet/Objet, 2004.
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