Caterina Barbieri
Director of the Music Department
Born in Bologna in 1990, Caterina Barbieri is an Italian musician and composer based in Berlin, established in the field of electroacoustic music.
In 2012 she earned her diploma in classical guitar with Walter Zanetti at the Conservatorio G.B. Martini in Bologna, where in 2014 she also earned a diploma in electroacoustic composition with Francesco Giomi after studying at the Royal College of Music and the Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm. In 2015 she earned a degree in Modern Literature at the University of Bologna with a thesis in Ethnomusicology on the relationship between American minimalism and Hindustani classical music.
In a very few years, Barbieri has participated in some of the most important music festivals in the world, from Unsound to Atonal, Primavera Sound and Sonar, and has presented her work in prestigious venues such as the Barbican Centre in London, La Biennale di Venezia, the Centre Pompidou, IRCAM and Ina GRM in Paris, the Berliner Festspiele, Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City, the Ruhrtriennale, the Philarmonie de Paris, and the Cannes Film Festival among the many.
Barbieri has released eight albums and in 2021 founded her own independent label, “light-years”, with which she has curated a series of showcases invited by entities such as the Centre Pompidou, Berlin Atonal and Southbank Centre.
Since her first revelation album, Patterns of Consciousness (Important Records, 2017), Caterina Barbieri has worked with modular synthesis and various electroacoustic formations to explore the physical and metaphysical effects of sound on the listener. Her music, described by Pitchfork as “a mind-altering journey” and a “dreammachine for the ears”, is based on the use of modular synthesizers, from the more vintage Buchla to new generation Eurorack systems, to explore the psychedelic potential of complex generative computation techniques. Her research investigates the relationship between technology and the creative process, exploring themes tied to memory and the phenomenology of perception, often delving into states of altered consciousness, ecstasy and temporal hallucination.
Her subsequent albums have met with growing critical acclaim: the crisp melodic computations of Ecstatic Computation (Editions Mego, 2019) named as one of the best albums of the year by many international critical magazines; then Spirit Exit (light-years, 2022), which incorporated a wider universe of sounds, monumental and intimate, inexorably futuristic yet capable of evoking a deep primordial energy. An important point of evolution in her music, Spirit Exit, described by critics as a “album of enthralling compositional skill”, was presented in collaboration with visual artist Ruben Spini and the light and set designer Marcel Weber in a series of live performances in which the sound dialogues with light and video to generate intense multisensory experiences. Barbieri’s electronic explorations have in fact never been limited to the album format: her experimentation, informed both by her live instrumental practice and her attention to visual languages, relies on live performance as a means of compositional development, as if it were a “living organism”.
In 2019 she was included in the catalogue of the historic music publisher Warp Publishing and in 2021 composed the sound track for the film John and the Hole directed by Pascual Sisto and written by Nicolas Giacobone (a film selected at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival and presented at Sundance 2021); in 2023 her music was featured in Il popolo delle donne by Italian video artist and director Yuri Ancarani, a film presented at the 21st edition of Giornate degli Autori at the Venice International Film Festival.
This year she worked with Kali Malone, the American musician who had participated in Biennale Musica 2023, on great sound and environmental installation by artist Massimo Bartolini titled Due qui/To hear, conceived for the Italian Pavilion as part of the 60th International Exhibition of Contemporary Art of La Biennale di Venezia.
In 2024, Barbieri presented her new work Womb in concert in Paris, commissioned by IRCAM and the Centre Pompidou for the ESPRO multichannel system, and has recently been on tour in America and Asia.