My recent artistic research has led me to spotlight on themes such as colonization, slavery and the machinery of terror. Particularly, my current focus is on the chronicles of the colonization of South the end of the 15th century.

Reading through literature on that time, I discovered terrifying facts about the very first encounter between the Spaniards under Cortez and the Mexica – the Azteks ruled by Moctezuma. The account of that episode enlightens the total impossibility of an understanding of two completely different cultures. The account of this encounter reveals many aspects related to the absurdity and fatality of the situation – it displays the immense differences and total impossibility of understanding at first.
Tentative encounters depict exactly these impossible dialogues between cultures so far apart. Each of the five movements represents a different kind of mis-understanding or mis-communication, which are expressed on a musical level in various formal ways, but often by the interplay of contrasting sound structures. Each musical body tries to communicate its own identity, but the dialogue is inconclusive, impossible.
Alessandro Baticci

Prix ÉLAN 2025