In a sun-bleached valley in the Ossola area of northern Italy, sound returns to shed light on a history of centuries of marble extraction. Each year, Nextones takes place in the reclaimed Tones Teatro Natura quarry. This return is not loud or spectacular. It is slow, attuned and humble – a careful way of exploring the history of a landscape.
Acoustic topographies
Authentically evolving in its own direction, Nextones doesn’t rely on sensory spectacle or overstimulation. Instead, it positions sound as a means of perceiving the landscape and its history, where soundmaking serves as a research technology and a tool of redirection. At Nextones, artistic gestures deepen our relationship to the terrain.
Nextones’ quarry is not a blank canvas; it is fragile, historically loaded, and acoustically alive. Every element of the terrain, from the mineral rock composition to the softness of the light, becomes part of the composition. Once the site of intensive marble extraction in the Ossola Valley, the space still bears the physical memory of human intervention; its deep cuts, abrupt vertical walls, and echoing cavities are a record of both industry and erosion. Every mineral surface and every contour of the terrain contributes to its acoustic profile.
Ruggero Pietromarchi, Artistic Director of Nextones Festival — co-produced by Threes Productions and Fondazione Tones on the Stones — was first drawn to the site for its unique audiovisual potential. He recalls how the quarry was an interesting way to explore this medium ‘of the relation between sound and image’. It wasn’t just a dramatic setting, it became a testing ground for spatial and sonic experimentation. What emerged wasn’t merely a festival in a quarry, but a curatorial framework deeply informed by the land’s raw materiality and immersive presence. Over time, Nextones grew into an experimental platform that invited artists and audiences alike to engage with the quarry’s sonorous and geological qualities, treating the site not as a setting, but as the protagonist.
Tuning into the terrain
Rather than imposing upon the land, Nextones’ curatorial approach is grounded in listening to it, allowing the site to lead its form. This mirrors the festival’s long-form commitment to site-based curation. New commissions are often born from time spent listening to the environment; not just acoustically, but sensorially, socially, ecologically. ‘We don't see sound in opposition to other modes of expression’, Ruggero Pietromarchi reflects. ‘But it’s undervalued!’
The notion of landscape as a resonant body extends across the programme. One example is Sara Persico and Mika Oki’s audiovisual piece Sphaîra, exploring sonic memory and its entanglement with physical space, folding abstract textures into dense, spatially immersive compositions. In the natural reverb of the quarry, sound swells into presence, transforming architecture, terrain, and atmosphere into a shared sensory field.
Tuning into the terrain
Rather than imposing upon the land, Nextones’ curatorial approach is grounded in listening to it, allowing the site to lead its form. This mirrors the festival’s long-form commitment to site-based curation. New commissions are often born from time spent listening to the environment; not just acoustically, but sensorially, socially, ecologically. ‘We don't see sound in opposition to other modes of expression’, Ruggero Pietromarchi reflects. ‘But it’s undervalued!’
The notion of landscape as a resonant body extends across the programme. One example is Sara Persico and Mika Oki’s audiovisual piece Sphaîra, exploring sonic memory and its entanglement with physical space, folding abstract textures into dense, spatially immersive compositions. In the natural reverb of the quarry, sound swells into presence, transforming architecture, terrain, and atmosphere into a shared sensory field.
The festival as a cartography of sound
However, sound is not the only way through which visitors interact with the landscape. At Nextones, walking is more than a mode of arrival. Hikes, detours, and slow going-abouts structure the festival experience, asking participants to inhabit the landscape on foot, and with full attention. As one climbs, listens, or pauses to rest, a deeper orientation emerges, one not dictated by stage times or spectacle, but by the rhythm of the place.
This year, that approach takes root even further in the remote medieval village of Gesch, nestled high in the Ossola mountains. Once abandoned, the six-house settlement is now slowly being rebuilt by a local non-profit using traditional architectural techniques.
It is here one artist has been invited for a residency, composing and preparing a site-specific performance shaped by the village’s intergenerational memory. The residency culminates in a guided hike to the village, where audiences are welcomed into a small amphitheatre, carved between the rebuilt structures, becoming the site of listening.
Past years have seen acoustic interventions in forest clearings and performances inside stone homes. This latest gesture continues that lineage, deepening the dialogue between artist, land, and listener. It’s a process of resonance; not just sonic, but social and material.
What began as an itinerant event has become a rooted platform for what Ruggero Pietromarchi describes as ‘a process of regeneration and reappropriation’. Through sound, abandoned and once-extractive landscapes are reanimated; not simply reclaimed, but re-understood; ‘sound can guide us in this process’. He explains how it’s about expanding forms of knowledge and perception; how we sense, how we feel, how we relate to the land. It’s not about reclaiming space, but attuning to it, letting sound unsettle, reveal, and ultimately recompose our ways of knowing and being with place.
