Never Ground – XV EDITION OF VIDEO SOUND ART FESTIVAL

Video Sound Art Festival celebrates its fifteenth edition — a major milestone marking fifteen years of activity dedicated to the production and promotion of contemporary art. From 28 to 30 November 2025, the festival returns with an edition titled Never Ground, set in a new exhibition venue in Milan: the Magazzini Raccordati, located in the tunnels beneath Milano Centrale Station.
Since 2011, Video Sound Art has been exploring the relationship between contemporary art and unconventional exhibition spaces — public schools, theaters, sports facilities, scientific institutions, and abandoned sites — to investigate the ability of art to engage with the social and urban fabric. From the former Albergo Diurno Venezia to the Volta high school, from the Cozzi and Romano swimming pools to the Historical Archive of the Ospedale Maggiore del Policlinico, each venue has become an integral part of the festival’s artistic research.
This year, the Festival once again reaffirms its vocation by choosing a space deeply connected to the theme of its fifteenth edition: the underground — both as a physical location and a symbolic threshold, a metaphor for the voices that have been submerged by structures of power throughout history, a gateway to initiatory descents, and a place of metamorphosis.
The Festival takes its title from Never Ground, a new work by Natália Trejbalová, produced by Video Sound Art and created with the support of the Italian Council program promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. The work will enter the collection of Museion (Bolzano). Acting as a resonating chamber, the Festival amplifies and deepens the theoretical implications of the artwork, developing them through a series of thematic expansions. Recent scientific research has revealed how life can adapt to extreme conditions, prompting us to reconsider the very limits of existence. Subterranean ecosystems, resilient bacteria, and life forms that challenge our understanding: exploring the depths of the Earth means opening ourselves to new biological models — perhaps even to clues about other forms of life in the universe.
The sci-fi dimension, which has often anticipated technological and scientific discoveries, becomes for Trejbalová a tool for investigating the contemporary world. Never Ground will be accompanied by a publication distributed by Mousse Publishing, created collaboratively by the artist and researcher Stella Succi. The book brings together fragments of texts inspired by literary, philosophical, scientific, and science-fiction works centered on the notion of the underground.
In dialogue with Natália Trejbalová, the Festival will also feature works by Adele Dipasquale, Nicoletta Grillo, and Andrea Mauti.
Adele Dipasquale’s new video work explores acts of subversive mutism and the mediumistic practices that offered women in the twentieth century an alternative channel of expression.
Through a series of sculptural interventions, Andrea Mauti investigates the poetic and narrative potential of objects once liberated from the political and social contexts in which they are embedded. For this edition, he presents Esausta. (Voice Voice) — a site-specific installation made with ashes from the firing of clay objects, soil, vegetable charcoal, fennel essential oil, and steel. The work reflects on the enduring influence of the dead: language itself — and the words through which we communicate — constitute a true legacy, a relic transmitted by those who came before us.
Nicoletta Grillo presents an installation in dialogue with the steps that will host the public program, an assemblage of images exploring the Tyrrhenian territory of Calabria. The series is a topographic fabulation that depicts places shaped by the movement of matter and people between land and sea.

Open Call 2025
Dialogues from the Underground is the title of the open call launched by Video Sound Art for the fifteenth edition of the festival, curated by Francesca Colasante in collaboration with Pollinaria and TAB | Take Away Bibliographies. In line with the festival’s theme, the call invited artists, creatives, and researchers to take part in a residency dedicated to exploring the underground — both as a symbolic and real space.
The selected project, TUNING FOR RELATIONSHIPS. Practices of Somatic Speleology by Sofia Salvatori, investigates the perceptual potential of the body in relation to hypogeal environments through listening and attunement exercises with the depths of the ground.
The residency took place at Pollinaria, an organic farm and research center active since 2007 in Abruzzo, which promotes projects integrating art, agriculture, and the environment. A core component of the project was also the editorial and research approach of TAB | Take Away Bibliographies, which collects and shares bibliographies through the production of zines as a collective practice of non-linear, non-productive knowledge-making, including textual and multimedia sources — preferably open access.
On Friday, 28 November, during the festival opening, Sofia Salvatori will present the outcomes of TUNING FOR RELATIONSHIPS. Practices of Somatic Speleology in conversation with Francesca Colasante (curator of the open call), Rita Duina (who will present TAB’s new fanzine), and Letizia Scarpello for Pollinaria. Conceived as an open narrative, the publication interweaves images, notes, and theoretical references, becoming both an extension and a trace of the collective research process.
On the mornings of Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 November, Sofia Salvatori will also lead a workshop inviting participants to “descend” with their bodies — an experience rooted in eco-somatic practice that evokes speleological movement: an act of listening, releasing, and abandoning verticality to perceive space in new ways.
Public Program
Curated by Stella Succi, the public program of the fifteenth edition offers a schedule of talks and presentations open to the public — a space for dialogue and speculative experimentation. Through connections among the arts, philosophy, and science, it seeks to expand and share the research processes underpinning the exhibited projects.
On Saturday, 29 November, three encounters will take place. The first brings together philosopher Paolo Pecere, curator Barbara Casavecchia, and artist Luca Trevisani for a conversation on the relationship between the arts and the underground across time — from prehistoric expressions to contemporary practices and imaginaries.
The second talk features speleologist Francesco Sauro, microbiologist Martina Cappelletti, and artist Natália Trejbalová. Drawing from scientific research and the artistic and editorial project Never Ground, the discussion will address the underground as a crossroads between the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial, between deep time and the future.
The day will conclude with a performative reading featuring contributions by Annamaria Ajmone, Altalena, Sandra Cane, Ivan Carozzi, Piergiorgio Caserini, Attila Faravelli, Frankenstein, Medusa, and Murmur, in an intertwining of voices and sounds evoking the many forms of depth.