The European Festivals Association and The Festival Academy invited the members of our communities to a year-end online party.

The communities of The Festival Academy and the European Festivals Association gathered digitally for our year-end party to share experiences, get to know each other and have fun!

The party took place ONLINE on Friday, 18 December at 2 pm CET/Brussels time.

Our online parties are moments for sharing experiences, socialising and having fun with great music played by artists from all over the world.

Our hosts for this party are MATTEO P and MISTER S.

After touring worldwide with his violin, Matteo P fundraised to start a music festival in the town where he grew up. There, he hosts any European Festivals Association or The Festival Academy member passing by “La bella Italia” (Google Maps: “Lugo”, if you want to be next). He calls himself a creative producer but is pretty much flexible to anything related or non-related. Currently, he teaches music to some hundreds of middle-school kiddos, awaiting for the whole world to get a vaccine and to get back on track doing projects here and there.

Mister S, a formerly dark sarcastic polyglot clown of the cold war era, and currently festival maker and producer, or is this other way round?

(Credit for Mister S' picture: E. Ghiasi)

For this party, music came with NELSON D, a Brazilian artist, at the same time a music producer and a performer.

In 1986, an indigenous baby was found in the streets of Manaus, a city in the state of Amazonas. He lived in an orphanage for eight months until an Italian couple took him to a comfortable home and called him their son. Baptised as Davide De Merra, the Manaus-native became an Italian citizen, grew up in Savona and studied Fine Arts in Milan, but chose São Paulo to spread his work as a musician and music producer. Nelson D’s musical research dives into the fountains of electronic music and indigenous culture, mixing organic and traditional sonorities with technological processes, fitting in the concept of Indigenous Futurism. An intimate sound path where officially the artist confronts himself not only as a music producer but also in the role of Performer, in a futuristic rite with ancestral echoes in the search of originary memories, a profaning invitation that becomes ‘sacred’ and a body that does not define itself, nor limits but overflows ruptures in the re-existence outside of the chronological time, abandons labels, colonial gender tags, revealing identities’ liquidity in the post-modernity, cultural contrasts, transgressions of all kinds, the abandonment and rejection of Romantism.

You can get to know NELSON D's music here.