Spellbound Festival 2026 Programme Includes Nkisi’s Overnight Sleeping Concert

Spellbound Festival returns to Turin this year with events spread across late June and late September. ALMARE, the organisation behind the festival, confirmed the programme will use four venues: PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Orto Botanico, Imbarchino del Valentino, and Magazzino sul Po.

The core of the Saturday 27 June evening is a new overnight sleeping concert by Nkisi. Titled Desert Songs, the piece was developed with the Nyege Nyege collective and builds on ideas from her Venice Biennale Musica 2025 project Anomaly Index. That earlier work drew on reports of auditory hallucinations that people experience during sleep in desert environments. Audiences at Spellbound will be invited to stay inside the park overnight throughout the performance, collapsing the usual divide between concert and rest.

While the full lineup is not yet public, the announcement positions the festival as a deliberately shaped sequence of live music and talks. The choice of venues, all green spaces or repurposed cultural sites along the Po river, reinforces a format that avoids standard concert halls. The programme stretches across two intensive weekends, leaving enough time between the June and September blocks to let the work settle.

This is the first major open air presentation of Nkisi’s long-form research into psychoacoustics and sleep. It also marks another collaboration with Nyege Nyege, a partnership that pushes the festival’s curatorial scope beyond the experimental electronic circuit it has been known for.