How do festivals transform in the age of the pandemic? A convincing answer comes from Rome, with the Festival Creature 2020. Until 20 December 2020, the event promotes acoustic tours in inaccessible places, a programme of podcasts, workshops and sound maps, investigating the relationship between architecture and music.

The project is an interesting experiment in the hybridisation of space and sound, architecture and music. One of the characteristics of the Festival Creature 2020, now in its fourth edition, is the choice of unusual places, normally not designated to host works of art, in order to create new dialogues between works and contexts.

“In the perception of architectural and urban spaces we are used to concentrating on the sequence of images, underestimating the importance of the other senses in defining the experience,” says Giorgio Pasqualini of Open City Roma, the association organising the Creature Festival. “There is a direct correlation between space and sound; in some spaces sound can even be the dominant feature, the one that will remain most in the memory.”