TicinOFF: the musical, artistic and cultural off scene in Italian-speaking Switzerland of the 1980s (forthcoming)

Based on my personal experience, interviews with the protagonists, testimonies and documents of the time, TicinOFF, as per its title, recounts the ‘off’ scene in Italian-speaking Switzerland in the period between 1981 and 1994, strongly characterised by innovative and breaking expressions inspired above all by the avant-garde as well as by the new wave and post-punk scene of the large urban centres, which also had its epigones and spaces in our small reality.

Focusing mainly on projects and events that were for the most part self-produced or realised outside the institutional context (galleries, museums and bodies linked to the official culture circuit), the chronicle also contains references to spaces such as bars and discotheques of the time, the memory of which is still very much in the local collective imagination today, and which despite their purely commercial characteristics and aims, also attracted the ‘other’ public due to the absence of specific spaces.

The at times openly self-celebratory slant of the narration and the partly parental advisory anecdotes are aimed both at rendering the mood also in terms of the expressions and attitudes of the time, and as a tribute to the minor local celebrities protagonists of what in our small and provincial reality was an extraordinary era for creativity, spirit of innovation and rupture as well as declared hostility towards any form of existential compromise.

The book will be published by a major publishing house of Italian-speaking Switzerland and available in bookstores from spring 2026.