AVANT Festival holds its sixth edition in Lecce, southern Italy, from 9 to 11 October 2026, with free entry across three venues: Masseria Tagliatelle, Officine Cantelmo and the Basilica del Rosario. The first names announced are Den Sorte Skole, Angèle David-Guillou, Kenji Araki, Marie Delprat and Remo Helfenstein, alongside a screening of the documentary “We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher”.

The festival is curated by Sud Sonico and was co-founded with the Berlin platform Digital In Berlin. Its programme covers experimental composition, electronic music and sound art, and extends past the concerts into film, workshops and guided walks through the Salento landscape.

Who plays AVANT Festival 2026

The five artists announced so far come from five countries. Angèle David-Guillou is a French composer and pianist whose work moves between minimalism, electronic textures and environmental listening. Kenji Araki, from Austria, builds hybrid electronic music and performance around the relationship between technology, the body and sound. Marie Delprat, also French, combines voice, movement and experimental composition. Remo Helfenstein, a Swiss musician and sound artist, makes electroacoustic work. Den Sorte Skole, the Danish duo, assemble dense cinematic pieces from electronic production, field recordings and archival material.

The Mark Fisher documentary screens at Officine Cantelmo. Fisher, the British writer and cultural critic behind “Capitalist Realism” and “Ghosts of My Life”, remains a reference point for the hauntology strand of electronic music, and his writing on culture and politics carries into much of what the festival programmes.

Alongside the music, Sud Sonico runs a workshop on cultural fundraising and philanthropy aimed at artists and independent organisations, and the festival renews its partnership with 18 Meridiano Escursioni for a set of hikes across the Salento countryside.

A fundraiser attached to the 2026 edition

The 2026 edition collects donations for the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund. The festival states that the fund, set up under the surgeon and researcher Ghassan Abu Sittah, “supports the treatment and transfer of critically injured children from Palestine to specialised medical facilities, particularly in Lebanon, while providing medical, psychological and social assistance”, and that all donations collected during the festival go to that work.

Funding partners for the edition include Forum Austriaco di Cultura Roma, Fondazione Nuovi Mecenati, Pro Helvetia, the Greenfield Foundation and Heroines of Sound Festival, with the Royal Danish Embassy, Goethe-Institut Napoli, Praesens Editionen, TDF Mediterranea, Officine Cantelmo and 18 Meridiano Escursioni among the partners. The Wire is the media partner.

About AVANT Festival

AVANT Festival launched in Lecce in 2020, created by Sud Sonico in cooperation with Digital In Berlin as a platform for avant-garde and contemporary music in southern Italy. From the start it paired concerts with food, walks and group activities spread across the city’s historic centre and coastal sites, rather than staging everything on a single site.

The festival has run annually since, reaching a fourth edition in 2024 and a fifth in October 2025, and has built a programme around composers and sound artists working outside standard club and rock circuits. Sud Sonico, the Lecce-based association behind it, is also a cultural producer and consultancy, and has represented southern Italy at Eurosonic and at industry events in Zurich and Ljubljana.

The 2026 edition adds the fundraising strand and the Mark Fisher screening to that format. Programme details are published on the festival’s Facebook event page and on the Sud Sonico website. Further names for the 9 to 11 October line-up have not yet been announced.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

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