Kappa FuturFestival 2025

Turin, with its industrial archaeology still visible in structures like Parco Dora (the festival’s home), carries a past stretching back to Roman times, threading through the Middle Ages and blooming in the Baroque era as the capital of the Savoy Kingdom. A city of layers, where repurposed factories, monumental architecture, and a melancholic air of decadent elegance coexist. This is why Art&Techno, the special programme curated by Virginia Ghione and Gianluca Brignone, with the collaboration of the Art Guide Monica Gnocchi, fits so seamlessly with the intense experience of KappaFutur.

Tucked into a discreet curve along the Po River, hidden behind Turin’s unassuming façades, lies a 20th-century secret masterpiece, Casa Mollino. This private apartment, conceived between 1960 and 1968 by architect-designer-photographer-pilot-skier-occultist Carlo Mollino (1905–1973), was never his home. Instead, he designed it as one stages a fiction: with near-magical precision, each object placed to form a secret language, perhaps meant for another life — an afterlife.

During our visit, Fulvio Ferrari unraveled Mollino’s enigmas with overflowing passion, as if initiating us into a ritual. Ferrari, an absolute authority on Mollino, alongside his son Napoleone, directs the Museo Casa Mollino and has pored ove its archives with near-mystical devotion.

The apartment is a deeply oneiric time capsule, a theatre of the mind. Mollino, architect by training, son of an engineer who built over three hundred structures, was modernity’s ultimate dilettante: he flew and designed planes, crafted revolutionary skis tested by world champions, bent wood without cutting it for furniture, and drafted architectural plans ambidextrously. All while reading Freud, studying the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and photographing nude women as if trying to fix beauty into the negative of a dream.

Casa Mollino functions as an echo chamber. Every room hums with signs, mirrors that reflect questions instead of images, Egyptian symbols, the golden ratio or Fibonacci sequences. The central Salon Loto features eight chairs arranged like sacred lotus petals or the infinity symbol. The atmosphere is sensual, theatrical, intimate, yet utterly impersonal. As if the female body, which Mollino considered the most perfect ‘object’ ever created, were the true inhabitant of this space suspended between art and ritual.

Mollino never spoke of himself. He offered no coffee or champagne to friends. His life was a project meticulously edited for himself alone. In 1990, when an engineer rented the apartment and uncovered this hidden universe, its layers began to unravel. Today, the house remains shrouded in enigma, but perhaps that’s why it moves us so deeply: it is pure desire, form and function, pure modernist esoterica.

Here, every detail, from chairs and curtains to brazenly erotic Polaroids, serves a personal cult to the female body, not merely as an object of desire, but as the world’s perfect cipher. The body as architecture, as cosmic code, as mystical vessel. Mollino studied it, photographed it, designed around it, wrapped it in mirrors and symbols, elevated it to the status of absolute object.

What remains profoundly touching is the idea of a lifetime spent staging one's own absence — a gesture diametrically opposed to the festival's hyper-present, here-and-now rapture. Yet walking through that suspended apartment, guided by Ferrari’s fervour, felt like inhabiting a past fiction. A ceremony without end, a stage waiting for its protagonist’s return. If earthly life is a parenthesis where body becomes matter, and if reincarnation exists, I’m almost certain Mollino was reborn as Fulvio.

Friday night culminated with Soulwax’s hypnotic live performance on the Nova stage, featuring three synchronised drum kits and a line of analogue synthesizers that paid homage to electronic music pioneers like Wendy Carlos and Pauline Oliveros. The stage was enhanced by Marinella Senatore's luminaire installation Dance First, Think Later, a recurring collaborator at the festival. Due to the strike, The Martinez Brothers cancelled, depriving us of their New York groove. Instead, we were treated to Nina Kraviz’s deep and textured Siberian techno set. Meanwhile, in Parco Dora, Lena Willikens wove dark and suggestive soundscapes; Ryan Elliott B2B Ogazon crafted a polished, progressive narrative; and Paco Osuna delivered his signature brand of meticulous and ferocious techno, ensuring no one left without working up a sweat.

On Saturday, we left behind the noise of Parco Dora to immerse ourselves in another meticulously constructed dimension. We climbed one of the four hills that encircle Turin like a green crown, arriving at a modernist house perched atop the slope, boasting panoramic views of the city and a garden filled with sculptures. The day's pulse was attuned to private collecting, another facet of Kappa's ecosystem.

The house belongs to a family with deep ties to contemporary art, introduced by legendary gallerist Gian Enzo Sperone, a key figure in New York's art scene since the 1970s. Their collection breathes history and artistic passion. Three Richard Long pieces scattered between garden and living room; a Giuseppe Penone sculpture in dialogue with the trees; and Joseph Kosuth’s textual neon installation based on Freud, seemingly floating on one wall.

Tony Oursler appears as a digital specter in one room. There are several works by Turin-based marble sculptor (and ‘tattooer of stone’) Fabio Viale, known for dismantling classical canons to inject them into contemporary imagination. A fragmented Pietà with Virgin and Christ presented separately, ruptures the symbolic connection as mother and son no longer touch. Also, by Viale, a marble-crated box in the garden. His presence isn’t incidental: Kappa’s collectors champion local talent, reinforcing an artistic fabric that weaves tradition and avant-garde from the heart of Piedmont. The collection also includes Warhol, Lichtenstein, Mario Merz, Pistoletto, Julian Schnabel (with his seven-headed monster), and a striking seemingly site-specific large-scale work by the fabulous El Anatsui that leaves no one indifferent.

An eclectic, generous, and living collection, infused with the same cult of form, symbol, and theatricality we saw in the previous day’s Art & Techno. Another fiction choreographed with care, high on the hill, a reminder that at KappaFutur, everything, from techno to art, aspires to be ‘scenefied.’

Saturday night at Kappa FuturFestival unfolded a sonic tapestry as sophisticated as it was immersive. Dixon delivered an impeccable set, polished yet cerebral, with his signature balance of elegance and emotional tension. Solomun, for his part, measured out moments of euphoria with extended melodic passages. Seth Troxler brought unbridled spontaneity and irreverence. Back at the Nova stage, the highlight was Floating Points’ live performance, real-time visuals of swirling-coloured fluids projected on screens created a kind of psychedellic atmosphere.

After two nights of techno intensity, a pictorial interlude –functioning as an emotional pause that allows for inner tempo contemplation– transported us to another meticulously crafted universe: the studio of Ernesto Morales, housed in a former school building. Morales, an Argentine artist based in Turin, employs mineral pigments that alter spatial perception, generating dynamic atmospheres responsive to movement and shifting light. A painter of thresholds and the intangible, his work is an alchemy of memory, perception, and landscape. In his Mindscapes or Clouds series, he creates a kind of ‘mental scenery’ akin to that evoked by techno beats, Parco Dora’s industrial architecture, and its theatrical solemnity. A perfect finale to this pilgrimage between techno and art.

The third night delivered a climactic finale. Diplo's sweat-inducing set was abruptly, almost surgically cut short when he overran his allotted time by a mere three minutes, a stark reminder that even hedonism operates on a stopwatch. Carl Cox’s live performance went viral, though not for his tracks but due to a spontaneous climber scaling one of the venue’s columns that forced an unplanned pause until a crane removed the intruder. Soon after, Charlotte de Witte embodied Belgian precision with taut rhythms and surgical structures, while Adam Beyer B2B Maceo Plex unleashed an effective repertoire straddling cosmic and physical realms. The true culmination came with Caribou's closing live set. Its hypnotic, emotionally calibrated perfection, its danceable, melodic layers echoed the entire experience: three days and nights with over 120,000 attendees.

The next edition will take place July 3-5, 2026 and tickets are already available at kappafuturfestival.it.