Rome, 2017. I left London to return to Italy and find myself in a phase of auditory irritability: I reluctantly attend large festivals, especially those centered around electronic music, but Dissonanze is a different story. For me, a castaway from beyond the English Channel, it is comforting to see an old friend like Giorgio Mortari, who is the father and educator of the Roman festival, and to engage in a one-on-one conversation with his ever-open and fertile mind.

Unlike me, Giorgio is charismatic and not destitute, enabling him to connect with the younger generation. He helps the kids of Nero, then innocent like a teenage Bianca Jagger, to afford the New York-Fiumicino flight for the post-conceptualist Cory Arcangel: he is coming to Dissonanze to perform Bruce Springsteen covers on the xylophone. While I have just completed my studies, Giorgio serves as a testament that learning should continue even in (seemingly) non-academic contexts, and that a festival can be an opportunity to recreate – just like in a laboratory -interdisciplinary occasions and relationships, free from earthly obsessions such as current events, relevance, and immediacy.

Thus, among the first decades that usher in the new millennium, a wormhole opens up, like a black hole, absorbing all possible light to bend space-time. In one way or another, we all fall into it. Take the artist Cyprien Gaillard, who, between sets of operatic electronics, seeks me out to discuss fashion, or the extraordinary woman with many names with whom I establish a deep communion of spirits while seated at a yellow marble table. She belongs to an ancient English family (and by ancient, I do not mean noble, but rather delicate).

The lady, Alalia Chetwynd, a performance artist and painter, still calls herself Spartacus Chetwynd, and in 2013, she will abandon the name of the rebellious slave to rename herself Marvin Gaye Chetwynd. This genteel white lady assumes the identity of a historically homosexual African American man, killed by his own father with gunshots. From 2018 onward, she will be reborn as Monster Chetwynd because the monstrosity of the West is the only thing we can consider bearable, and through continuous observation, the monstrous becomes sublime, and vice versa.