How C2C Festival curates Italy’s largest avant-pop showcase

Every fall, C2C Festival transforms Turin, Italy into global destination for music lovers.

This year, between October 29th and November 1st, the festival celebrated its 25th anniversary and welcomed over 43,000 attendees there to see pop music’s leading visionaries, including Robyn, Arca, Kelela, underscores, Crystallmess, Chuquimamani-Condori, Oklou, Smerz, Fine, Yung Lean, and more.

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The festival wasn’t always this expansive, both in size and in the mass popularity of the artists it books. It originally started as a local electronic event called Club To Club. “As the name suggested, it featured a programme involving several city clubs at the same time, connected by shuttle buses,” Davide Olivero, Head of Music at C2C Festival, tells The FADER after the busy festival weekend. “It reflected a vibrant period the city went through during the ‘90s.”

As the festival grew, Turin changed too. “Many venues, especially clubs, had closed, and the festival had to find a way to consolidate itself and to step outside the local scene.” Lingotto Fiere, a former Fiat 500 factory, became the festival’s base, opening up new possibilities for what could work as artistic space in the city. The location was especially prescient given Turin’s status as a waning industrial hub in Italy, helping bring new artistic vitality to a city in transition.

Despite all the changes, the festival’s experimental nature remained. “Club To Club and C2C Festival still share a common purpose: promoting new [musical] languages, which in the beginning lived in clubs,” says Olivero. “I wasn’t there for generational reasons, but at the turn of the millennium, Turin’s clubs were true laboratories for experimentation.

Over the past 10 years, the festival has increasingly rooted its curation in “avant-pop” — a shorthand for the ways that diverse genres (like Techno, Reggaeton, and experimental music) are increasingly intersecting in pop music. “We weren’t, of course, inventing anything new [with“avant-pop”]; it was a way of articulating something we were observing in music and felt increasingly drawn to,” says Olivero. “A space where genre boundaries become increasingly blurred and different languages can coexist.” In an era of endless revivals and overwhelming volume, the avant-pop lens helps the team spot interesting artistic trajectories and make “less predictable connections”.

For its 25th anniversary, C2C Festival resisted the obvious temptation to throw itself a party. The lineup brought together legends like Arca, Robyn, and Theo Parrish alongside newer voices such as underscores and Oklou. Its goal has always been to represent where music is now.

The historic names on the line-up are there for their “deep mark on music and artistic landscape,” while returning faces are “regulars precisely because they keep evolving and we find it exciting to host new chapters of their careers”. With a deliberately limited number of slots, every booking counts, a constraint the team embraces.

That responsibility also comes from how much the festival has changed. It’s often boxed in with other electronic festivals like Mira Festival in Barcelona and Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE), but C2C Festival today focuses far more on live performance and contemporary composition, with dance and DJ slots kept to a minimum and reserved “for artists who bring a fresh perspective to the practice”.

C2C Festival has an unusual bond with the audience, one that regularly sells the festival out before the full lineup is announced. But as a fully independent event, putting C2C Festival on carries significant financial risk. Its longstanding, ongoing attendees are what allow it “to stay as uncompromising as possible”. The aim is to reward curiosity, trusting that the audience is “open to being confronted with something they might not be familiar with or to seeing the familiar in a different light”.

Alongside the main programming at Lingotto, the festival hosts performances at OGR, Teatro Carignano, Teatro Regio, and Combo. “Teatro Carignano is a true landmark of Torino and one of the most stunning baroque theatres in Italy,” says Olivero. “Teatro Regio, which is the city’s main opera theatre… these are venues the people rarely get a chance to visit beyond their traditional theatrical and opera programming.”

At Teatro Carignano, Smerz played a very special matinee show closing their ‘Big City Life’ tour to a theatre full of beaming eyes, grateful to watch them in such an intimate setting. It was one of many moments over the weekend where the venue shaped the experience. There were also events at clubs Le Roi and Notorius, reviving the format the festival was known for two decades ago.

Bringing people together was always the goal of Sergio Ricciardone, C2C Festival’s original founder, who sadly passed away early last year. His legacy is passed down through the success of C2C Festival, both nationally and across the world — with the recently inaugurated New York City edition at Knockdown Center, which last year featured Arca, Nourished By Time, and more. Olivero describes it as “a sample of what we do in Torino.”

The festival’s eclectic philosophy comes most to life through the collaborations it facilitates on stage. At C2C Festival, Robyn and Yung Lean joined forces for “Robotboy,” and their Charli XCX “360” remix, Oklou and underscores performed “harvest sky,” and Arca and Bill Kouligas closed the festival with a secret 3 A.M. set.

C2C Festival is the only place in the world where you could find yourself in the crowd of a Chuquimamami-Condori set dancing with Arca, or singing an Addison Rae remix by Crystalmess next to Kelela. Avant-pop is here.