The Imaginaria festival is proud to present, in an exclusive appearance for Puglia, one of the most original and courageous voices on the contemporary Italian scene: Gaia Banfi.
Sound and image seek each other out, challenge each other, complete each other. The opening evening is not a prologue to Imaginaria: it is already an integral part of it, and anticipates its deepest meaning. An evening to begin Imaginaria 2026 exactly as we want it to continue: with music and images that refuse to settle.
Artist
Gaia Banfi
Gaia Banfi is a Milan-based singer-songwriter, musician and producer, who graduated with top honours in Jazz Voice from the Bologna Conservatoire. The daughter of Baffo Banfi, legendary keyboard player for the prog group Un Biglietto per l’Inferno, she grew up immersed in music and built a highly personal language in which pop, singer-songwriting and electronics merge boldly: airy vocals intertwined with distorted sounds pushed to the limits of singability, with the voice as an element of production on a par with any other instrument.
Her album La Maccaia (2025, Trovarobato) was received by audiences and critics alike as one of the best Italian records of the year, followed by a European tour that took her to Trans Musicales in Rennes, Eurosonic and the Ment Festival in Ljubljana.
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Ex Monastero di San Benedetto · Conversano
The evening takes shape in a space that carries centuries of memory and transformation — the same raw materials Imaginaria has always worked with. The festival was born from the conviction that cinema is a language capable of touching what words alone cannot reach: the inner vision, the dream, the metamorphosis. It is that same conviction that guides the choice to open each edition with a live performance that is not mere entertainment, but a complete artistic act.
