C2C Festival 2025 in Turin: Sonic Geographies and Urban Transformation

From October 30 to November 2, 2025, Turin hosts the twenty-third edition of C2C Festival, “Per Aspera Ad Astra” — set within the post-industrial architectures, featuring an international line-up.

C2C Festival 2025: Turin Between Sound, Memory, and a New Cultural Geography

Industrial and anarchic. Esoteric and decadent. Alpine and multicultural. Turin has always been described in contrasts — the most French of Italian cities, once the first capital of a kingdom, now a laboratory of reinvention. To understand Turin beyond clichés, one can look at the initiatives it generates. Among them, one stands out: C2C.

Much has changed since 2002, when C2C was born as Club to Club. The idea was to map the city through its clubs — Turin as one big dance floor. One ticket gave you access everywhere. On March 15th, 2002, the first edition moved between Jammin’, BarBar, and Notorius. Later that year, Jeff Mills, FC Kahuna, and Ellen Allien played at Hiroshima Mon Amour. It never stopped since.

From October 30 to November 2, 2025, Turin will host the twenty-third edition of C2C Festival, one of Europe’s most relevant platforms for avant-pop music and contemporary experimentation. The 2025 edition, titled Per Aspera Ad Astra, marks a turning point: it is the first since the passing of Sergio Ricciardone, the founder who redefined the festival as a curatorial language as much as a musical event.

The Latin motto, “through hardships to the stars,” encapsulates the spirit of this edition — crossing a complex legacy while looking ahead. C2C reaffirms itself as a constantly evolving cultural device, capable of using the city as its stage, laboratory, and living material for experimentation.

Lingotto Fiere: The Former Fiat Factory Becomes a Cathedral of Contemporary Sound

Lingotto Fiere, once FIAT’s industrial plant and redesigned by Renzo Piano in the 1990s, is the core of the festival’s two central nights, October 31 and November 1. The vast modular space of more than 100,000 square meters — once devoted to car production — now hosts the festival’s most ambitious musical productions.

During C2C, Lingotto is reconfigured as a genuine acoustic infrastructure. Its halls and pavilions become resonance fields where the rigidity of industrial architecture confronts — and converses with — the fluidity of sound. Here, the festival stages its largest and most nocturnal performances, building a sonic landscape that moves between electronic music, rap, experimental pop, and visual research.

The functional architecture of Lingotto, stripped of ornament, allows for a collective experience that is both physical and perceptual — a secular ritual inside a concrete cathedral.

Stone Island × C2C Festival

The dialogue between Stone Island and C2C Festival started in 2019 and found one of its most distinctive expressions in the Stone Island Stage. First inaugurated at C2C Festival in 2022 and enhanced last year with a new immersive stage design, the platform has hosted over time performances by artists such as A. G. Cook, Avalon Emerson, billy woods, Blackhaine, Dean Blunt, Elena Colombi, Gabber Eleganza B2B Bill Kouligas, Hagop Tchaparian, Hessle Audio with Ben UFO, Pangaea, Pearson Sound, John Glacier, Kode9, Mica Levi, Nick León, Snow Strippers, Space Afrika, Stenny, Tiga, Yaeji, Bambii, Crystallmess, Honour, Sangre Nueva, Tzusing, and Nu Genea with Bar Mediterraneo.

Stone Island, Strategic Partner of C2C Festival since 2019, returns for the fourth consecutive year with the Stone Island Stage, located in Pavilion 1 of Lingotto Fiere on October 31 and November 1. The collaboration between the brand and the festival — born from a shared vision and a long-term creative synergy — has led to a configuration that breaks traditional boundaries between stage, audience, and performer. With its iconic 360-degree design, the Stone Island Stage returns this year in an evolved form, conceived to offer an experience that is once again radical and immersive.

The 2025 line-up for the stage includes, on Friday, October 31, Barker, Djrum, Isabella Lovestory, Mechatok, Skee Mask, and Tresca Y Tigre & Lechuga Zafiro; followed on Saturday, November 1, by Blawan, Los Thuthanaka, John Maus, Florence Sinclair, Malibu, and XIII & Sabla.

OGR Torino: From Railway Workshops to the Epicentre of Art and Performance

Built in the late nineteenth century as the Officine Grandi Riparazioni, a vast complex for train and carriage maintenance, OGR Torino is now a multidisciplinary cultural centre managed by the CRT Foundation. Its industrial past is still visible in its monumental naves and structural details, but its present speaks of research, innovation, and intersections between art and technology.

For this edition, OGR hosts the opening and closing events of the festival. On Thursday, October 30, the stage welcomes Daniel Blumberg, Jenny Hval, and Kelman Duran, while Sunday, November 2 features billy woods, Maria Somerville, and Smerz. The choice of OGR for these moments of beginning and closure is deliberate: it embodies the continuity between the industrial and post-industrial city, between the mechanical labour of the past and today’s cultural production.

The contrast between architectural monumentality and the intimacy of certain performances creates a suspended atmosphere — as if the city itself were becoming a musical instrument.

Dyson × C2C HQ

Dyson OnTrac is the Official Partner of C2C Festival 2025 and presents DYSON × C2C HQ, a special event held on Saturday, November 1, at Combo Torino from 12:00 p.m. The program features performances by Lechuga Zafiro, Palm Wine, and Stefania Vos. From Thursday, October 30 to Saturday, November 1, festival guests at C2C HQ will have the chance to experience the new Dyson OnTrac™ headphones and listen to the festival’s official playlists in an exclusive listening setup.

Combo Torino: From Fire Station to Social Laboratory and Meeting Space

In the multicultural neighbourhood of Porta Palazzo, the former fire station that now houses Combo Torino serves as the festival’s operational core. Here takes place C2C HQ, the daytime programme of talks, showcases, and meetings tied to the European project TMLAB – Transnational Music Lab, dedicated to cross-border cultural cooperation.

Combo is not just a transit space, but a place of exchange and contamination. Bar, hostel, radio station, and stage coexist in a structure that encourages the circulation of ideas and people. In this context, music ceases to be performance and returns to being process — a form of collective cultural work.

Its location beside Europe’s largest open-air market gives tangible form to a precise idea of the city: not a showcase, but a living fabric where differences meet.

Teatro Regio and Fonderie Limone: From Critical Thinking to Childhood Participation

Teatro Regio hosts C2C Talks, a programme of workshops and open conversations addressing themes of citizenship, curatorship, and diasporic identity. Artists and professionals such as Andrea Laszlo De Simone and Mabe Fratti (with the Titanic project) explore the relationship between musical production and political imagination.

The choice of an opera theatre as a space for reflection introduces a rupture within the festival’s industrial geography, restoring an idea of Turin as a polycentric city where high culture and experimentation coexist without hierarchy.

At the same time, the Fonderie Limone in Moncalieri host C2C Kids!, a music lab for children curated by Ninos du Brasil and the Codalunga collective. Here, music becomes a primary, physical gesture — rhythm, play, and collective participation. The event takes place a few days before the festival’s official opening and embodies C2C’s will to extend its educational approach beyond the adult audience.

A Line-Up That Crosses the Boundaries of Contemporary Sound

The 2025 line-up includes sixty-eight artists from twenty-one countries, with twenty-one Italian exclusives and seven national debuts. It draws a complex cartography that follows not genres, but aesthetic tension.

The opening at OGR with Daniel Blumberg and Jenny Hval marks the festival’s performative side, while Lingotto Fiere hosts its largest productions: Four Tet, Floating Points, Blood Orange, Ali Sethi & Nicolas Jaar, A.G. Cook, Ecco2k, IOSONOUNCANE & Daniela Pes, Saya Gray, Blawan, Djrum, Model/Actriz, Skee Mask, and Annahstasia.

The presence of artists from diverse circuits — from British hyperpop to experimental American R&B to emerging Italian voices — reflects a clear curatorial direction: to create dialogue between music born on the margins and global artistic practices. C2C does not propose a linear narrative but a plurality of experiences where sound functions as a political language — a form of cultural traversal.

_____

This conversation with Sergio Ricciardone took place before his passing.

C2C, Turin – 21 Years of Avant-Pop Festival

Lampoon interviews Sergio Ricciardone

Behind it all was Xplosiva, the cultural association that still produces C2C today. “In the early 2000s the festival was very free because the city was,” explained Sergio Ricciardone, president of Xplosiva and one of C2C’s founders and creative directors. “It was a time of cultural rebirth after the FIAT crisis.”

Ricciardone, born in Turin, was then moving between Berlin and London before deciding to return home. “There was a strategic plan to position Turin internationally — and it felt very clear,” he recalled. Those were the years leading up to the 2006 Winter Olympics, when the city was buzzing with optimism and experimentation. “We were actors working from the bottom, because that’s where we came from.”

But the same Olympic wave that lifted Turin to its zenith also marked the beginning of a new decline. The economic system changed, and new forms of energy were needed. Club to Club, meanwhile, was spreading its roots beyond Turin — with events in Milan, then Berlin, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Brussels, and Istanbul.

From Club Nights to Cultural Landmarks

Alongside its club nights, the festival began entering Turin’s historic and industrial spaces — Teatro Regio, Teatro Carignano, Teatro Juvarra, and even Mole Antonelliana. Later, it took over the city’s post-industrial cathedrals: Lingotto, once FIAT’s car factory, and the OGR, the 19th-century railway workshops.

Club to Club was becoming C2C — a cultural festival that redefined avant-pop in Italy and across Europe. As the rhetoric of a “sleepy city” grew, C2C claimed a space that had remained empty: a stage capable of projecting Turin’s name across the international festival circuit.

Over two decades, C2C brought to the city artists such as Franco Battiato, Thom Yorke, and Aphex Twin, alongside innovators who shaped the sounds of the present and the future — Autechre, Arca, Sophie, Liberato, Richie Hawtin, Nu Genea, Jamie XX. The key idea: to break the boundaries between musical genres. Don’t call it an electronic music festival.

C2C 2023 – The Sounds of the World in Turin

“We have the honour and the responsibility to represent inspiring global scenes,” said Ricciardone. Despite its international reach, C2C has always remained rooted in a European mindset. For years, its official communications have located it in ‘Turin, Europe’. “We chose it when there was talk about Italy leaving the Eurozone,” he explained. “It was a way to claim a shared European sensibility.”

The reason was also practical: “Our network is made of European festivals and promoters working on high-level projects. It’s a way to embrace the collective feeling of our growth.” C2C also underlines the “strategic position of Turin — a frontier city, so close to France.”

In Italy’s Milan-centric narrative, Milan is often described as the country’s most European city, sometimes in contrast with Turin. But for Ricciardone the two are complementary: “Yin and Yang.” Not interchangeable, though. A central concept for C2C is the festival’s organic link with its birthplace. “A festival like ours couldn’t exist in Milan,” he said. “And what happens in Milan wouldn’t find a home in Turin. This city is a laboratory — it’s in its DNA.”

C2C

Founded in 2002 by Xplosiva, C2C celebrated its 21st edition in 2023, featuring 36 artists from 20 countries, 31 shows, 15 Italian exclusives, and 10 debuts. The edition also introduced C2C Kids, a new format held on November 1st at OGR.

Debora Vitulano