TECHNO Exhibition at Museion in Italy running until March 2022

Bart van der Heide, director of Museion, inaugurated the TECHNO exhibition, the first installment of a series of exhibitions under the name TECHNO HUMANITIES. TECHNO runs from September 11, 2021 – March 03, 2022, at the Museion in Bolzano, Italy. As a multi-media exhibition, it comprises an international group show, a day rave, a public program, a reader, an audio piece, and a podcast into its program.

Considering the historical advancement of electronic dance music along the lines of globalization, van der Heide emphasizes techno’s potential to drive social change. Consequently, TECHNO’s main themes are freedom, compression, and exhaustion. In a press release, van der Heide says,

“Mediated by new technologies, techno music became the soundtrack of liberation and escape. The compressed sonic architecture of the techno club forged meaningful bonds with its community, through collective and interconnected experiences of joy, exhaustion and calculated release.”

In accordance with the ethos of interconnectedness, a variety of artists contributed to the TECHNO exhibition at Museion. Those include Riccardo Benassi, Paul Chan, Nicolò Degiorgis, Karin Ferrari, Massimo Grimaldi, CC Hennix, Tishan Hsu, Mire Lee, Ghislaine Leung, Isabel Lewis, and Piero Martinello, amongst others.

The TECHNO exhibition at Museion is but a first instance of the longer project TECHNO HUMANITIES. In that line of exhibitions, international contributors explore themes ranging from ecology, technology, and economy to the very core of what it means to be human.

Electronic music art exhibitions are mushrooming around the globe, and their societal function to normalize electronic music as cultural expression remains paramount. Not only does that allow for the formation of powerful individual and collective identities through cultural belonging. It also enables the social organization to further social justice projects within the electronic dance music milieu. In doing so, they align with TECHNO’s call for action to dismantle “aspects of systemic injustice, exploitation and neglect” in the multi-billion-dollar techno industry.

Image Credit: Alberto Troia (Kyselina)