From 20 to 27 July 2025, Bergamo hosted the INPA Summer School, the project's first major collective phase. Around a hundred students, composers, visual artists and faculty from across Europe gathered for a week of intensive work spread across the venues of the Politecnico delle Arti and some of the city's most significant cultural sites: the Conservatorio Gaetano Donizetti, the Accademia di Belle Arti Giacomo Carrara, the Sala Boninelli of the Biblioteca Tiraboschi, and the INK Club.

The programme revolved around the theme of landscape, explored through the project's three thematic axes — Scopic/Soundscape, Uncontaminated/Urban, Historyscape/Futurscape — with a radically interdisciplinary approach: lectures, masterclasses, round tables and workshops in which the visual and sonic dimensions engaged in dialogue from the very first day.

Visiting Professor

Visual Arts Area

Brandon LaBelle, Stefano Romano

Music Area

Alfonso Alberti, Alda Caiello, Giorgio Colombo Taccani, Stefano Gervasoni, Emilio Guim, José Manuel López López, Damiano Meacci, Roberto Neri, Fabian Panisello, Umberto Pedraglio, Alessandro Solbiati, Gianmario Strappati

Contributions and Theoretical Talks

The →︎ round tables of the theoretical research groups opened the week with the public presentation and discussion of the contributions developed by the three WP1 groups.

Mario Cristiani presented Associazione Arte Continua, describing the model and history of the association, active since 1990 in the creation of public artworks in dialogue with space and local communities, conceiving art as a «natural» dimension of landscape and everyday experience.

Giuseppe Previtali (University of Bergamo) gave the talk Political Landscapes: Reclaiming Spaces on the Edge of Visibility, analysing the urban landscape as a product of political and social forces — and artistic practices as tools for making visible what processes of normalisation tend to erase from the public scene.

Ilaria Gadenz (Politecnico delle Arti di Bergamo / Accademia Albertina di Torino) gave a lecture and listening session titled Field Recording Otherwise: the Refusal of Epistemic Capture, exploring field recording as a situated, reflexive practice — a way of listening that does not aim to capture the world but to negotiate a knowledge that is always provisional and sensory.

Culture Beat 3

On Sunday 20 July, the international exhibition Culture Beat 3, curated by Agustín Sánchez, opened at the Accademia di Belle Arti Giacomo Carrara. The third stop of a touring project, after Poznań and Granada, the exhibition brought together 22 artists and faculty from 7 countries (Spain, Chile, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Serbia, Uruguay), exploring the cultural singularities of each context as a creative resource rather than a limitation.

Public Concerts

The week included two musical events open to the city, both held at the Teatro dell'Istituto Palazzolo:

  • Wednesday 23 July, 9:00 pm
  • Saturday 26 July, 5:00 pm

On stage were students from the singing, piano, electroacoustic music and tuba classes of the Conservatories of Bergamo, Ravenna and Florence, alongside Alda Caiello, Alfonso Alberti and Gianmario Strappati. The programme featured music by Schumann, Cage, López López, Debussy, Strauss, Berio, Parmegiani, Hayes, Schubert, Dhomont, and Liszt.

Closing

The week concluded on Saturday 26 July with the public presentation of the seminar held by Brandon LaBelle, and with a party at the INK Club in Bergamo — an informal moment of exchange among participants that extended, beyond the classroom, the sense of community built over the days of work.

July laid the foundations. The following October, with the →︎ Autumn School, the projects began to take on their definitive form.