Terraforma

This October, Terraforma EXO Palermo brings the Abdullah Miniawy Trio to Villa Tasca, with a project suspended between urban tension and spiritual depth, weaving jazz and Middle Eastern soundscapes together.

Egyptian poet, singer, composer and actor, Miniawy is one of the defining voices to emerge from the Arab Spring generation, known for fusing politically charged Arabic lyricism with experimental sound. He won the Victoires du Jazz with Le Cri du Caire, and has built a long dialogue with jazz through his collaboration with trumpeter Erik Truffaz — who also features on Peacock Dreams أَحْلَامُ الطَّاوُوسِ, one of Miniawy's most personal records.

Boomkat called it "unquestionably one of the year's most creative and incisive records," built on brass arrangements that gird his "stirringly poetic chants with sublime Nymanesque brass harmonies."

The setting is Villa Tasca: a 16th-century villa on eight hectares of citrus groves and centuries-old trees, on the road connecting Palermo to Monreale. Its garden, reshaped in the 1800s into one of Sicily's finest examples of Romantic landscape design, winds through palms, araucarias and subtropical species gathered from five continents, past hidden follies and a small lake, in a space that has quietly hosted composers, queens and poets for two hundred years.

🎫 Tickets on DICE — link in bio

The first edition of Terraforma Radical School has come to an end and with it something we have been working on since the last edition of the festival and it finally took shape. The programme was born from a desire to explore a different dimension of our research: more intimate, but no less rigorous. A space built around deep listening, sound practice and the transmission of knowledge that can only emerge when people share the same place and the same time—when the exchange between them becomes part of the work itself.

Donato Dozzy was the first mentor we envisioned for this journey: someone we have worked alongside for years, and whose approach to sound felt inseparable from what we were trying to build. Having him at Villa Arconati for these four days meant more than we expected. We are grateful for what this first edition has revealed about the potential directions this research can take.

We would like to thank the 15 participants who fuelled the programme with enthusiasm and care, developing four beautiful soundscapes for the Labyrinth—each distinct and full of character. Finally, we would also like to thank Fondazione Augusto Rancilio for its collaboration, and Cotopaxi and Slam Jam for their invaluable support.