Where Light Rests

Alongside the ongoing focus on the landscape of Lake Maggiore—never a simple backdrop but a true interlocutor—CROSS 2025 opens a window onto a powerful and fascinating elsewhere: India. Not as exoticism, but as mirror and contrast, as an invitation to view the relationship between gesture and the sacred from another angle. The performative traditions of the subcontinent—so deeply tied to myth, ritual repetition, and the symbolic value of detail—enter into dialogue with contemporary practices that explore spirituality through hybrid, diasporic, and deconstructed lenses.

Some of the performances in the program delve into this very tension between the visible and the invisible. In one, sound is treated as living matter, capable of evoking presences; in another, the female body becomes the site of a sacredness that is both ancient and futuristic. Some artists choose darkness as a privileged perceptual condition; others move along the edge of meditation and trance, inviting the audience not merely to observe, but to participate.

Walking itself becomes both an artistic and spiritual practice.. We are invited to follow the flow of water as a trace of memory and transformation. Or to venture along the trails of the surrounding hills, where nature becomes a silent, knowing interlocutor, and the gaze is retrained to notice detail, to follow the slow breath of the forest. In urban walks, the human voice merges with the lakeside landscape and with the search for a dwelling place—a space to inhabit, even if only for an instant. These journeys offer no spectacle in the conventional sense, but rather an invitation to attention, to presence, to contemplation.

CROSS never imposes a single vision; rather, it offers a field of experience. In this field, light is not just what illuminates the scene, but what shifts in tone, softens, accompanies, withdraws. An invitation to look more closely. To remain, even in uncertainty. To keep searching for that subtle vibration we sometimes call art—and sometimes, without naming it, call spirituality.

This curatorial vision was not born from an isolated intuition, but was nourished by a long path of research, listening, and sharing. It is the fruit of conversations with masters, of talks with artists who opened both heart and mind, of deep dialogue with sacred texts, with the visions of Florensky and Sri Aurobindo, from the extraordinary encounter with Andrew Cohen, and from the meditative practices that have guided my reflection. The research has been supported by the sadhanas of Kunpen Lama Gangchen—a place of Buddhist contemplation where every gesture is brought back to a dimension of silent attention.

Each of these experiences has helped shape this edition, giving it both soul and direction. I feel deeply grateful to have reached this milestone and to be able to share with the audience and with the artists this ongoing quest, which each time is renewed and made anew.