La radio vuota – La memoria dei suoni (The empty radio – The memory of sounds) is a site-specific project celebrating the sound history of a place destined for profound transformation. This multimedia work by Italian-Swiss composer Andrea Molino is part of the 27th season of 900presente, offering an immersive reflection on acoustic memory and the value of sound as intangible heritage.

For decades, the Besso radio studios have been a hub of musical culture in Italian-speaking Switzerland, a place of creation and dissemination where classical and contemporary repertoires, voices, testimonies and experimentation have intertwined. With the start of work on the Città della Musica, the studios will be decommissioned and, for a short period, will remain empty, reverberating with the silence of a space that has hosted generations of sounds and words. Andrea Molino – known for his intermedia approach and the dialogue between visual arts, electronics and live music – transforms this transition into a total work of art. Through footage of the empty spaces curated by CISA and fragments and sound documents retrieved from the RSI archives, Molino composes a fresco that restores the layered acoustic memory of these spaces to the public. An artistic creation that reworks the past to project it into the future.