Four years after his last project in Italy, and following the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement awarded by La Biennale di Venezia in 2023, Eno returns to the country with two ambitious installations presented across two of Parma’s most significant cultural landmarks: the Monumental Complex of San Paolo and the Ospedale Vecchio, both recently restored and reopened to the public.
At the Giardini di San Paolo, Eno presents SEED, a project unfolding in two phases. The first introduces the site-specific audio installation Installation for Giardini di San Paolo, created by Brian Eno together with Turkish journalist and writer Ece Temelkuran. Spread across the gardens, the work immerses visitors in an evolving landscape of generative sound.
In its second phase, the work will be permanently housed at the Casa del Suono, where the audience’s listening experience in the gardens will be captured through field recordings and pressed onto a single vinyl edition, produced by Eno himself and added to the museum’s permanent collection as a testament to the collaboration between the artist and the City of Parma.
The monumental Crociera spaces of the Ospedale Vecchio will host My Light Years, the most comprehensive presentation ever assembled of Brian Eno’s installations and audiovisual works. The exhibition offers a wide-ranging exploration of the artist’s decades-long investigation of light, sound and generative systems.
Among the highlights are 77 Million Paintings (2006) and Face to Face (2022), two landmark works reflecting Eno’s ongoing exploration of time, perception and identity in the digital age.
Both projects are promoted by the Municipality of Parma, curated and produced by Alessandro Albertini (Influxus) in collaboration with Dominic Norman-Taylor, Juliana Consigli and Martin Harrison (Lumen London).
“My Light Years” is supported by Fondazione Cariparma, which shares with the Department of Culture the belief in the powerful role of art in supporting and developing the local community. SEED, on the other hand, ranked first—both in terms of points and the amount of funding received—in the list of projects under the PAC2025 public call for proposals promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.
“My feeling is that making art can be more usefully thought of as gardening: you plant some seeds and then watch what happens between them, how they grow and interact. This approach is sometimes called ‘procedural’. I call it ‘generative’.
Just as a garden is different every year, a generative artwork may be different each time you see or hear it. Such a work is never truly finished — there is never a final state.
In the Giardini di San Paolo I will create a new work designed specifically for this place. It will fill the entire space, which feels like a secret garden — closed for many years and now finally revealed.”
Speaking about the exhibition at the Ospedale Vecchio, he added:
“It’s an immense building, and it was a real challenge to understand how to distribute the works within such a large space. Some are recent, but most date further back and include some of the very first light installations I made in the 1970s. It will be quite a varied show — and it will require visitors to do a lot of walking.”
Installation for Giardini di San Paolo is a site-specific audio installation composed of multiple layers of generative music created by Brian Eno and diffused across the entire 8,000-square-metre area of the gardens.
Visitors are invited to move freely through the space, creating their own personal soundtrack as the music continuously evolves. Each listening experience becomes unique, shaped by movement, perception and time.
The project explores themes central to Eno’s work: the manipulation of sound and duration, and the relationship between humans, nature and landscape.
Presented inside the Ospedale Vecchio, My Light Years brings together for the first time the complete collection of Brian Eno’s audiovisual installations in a single venue.
Conceived by Eno as “visual music,” 77 Million Paintings is a landmark example of generative art: a constantly evolving environment of sound and light created through algorithmic combinations of images and music. Like a painting that never repeats itself, the work slowly transforms before the viewer, ensuring that no two moments are ever the same.
Face to Face continues Eno’s exploration of randomness and generative systems. Starting from photographs of eighteen real individuals, specially designed software gradually morphs each face into the next through a pixel-by-pixel transformation process. The result is a continuous sequence of intermediate portraits — “new humans” who have never existed — generating more than 170,000 unique faces in this version of the work.
Brian Eno, Seed e My Light Years, Parma, May 1st – August 2, 2026
My Light Years is supported by Fondazione Cariparma, while SEED ranked first in the national PAC2025 funding programme promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
images: (cover 1) Brian Eno a Parma per SEED e My Light Years – foto di Michele Riccomini (2) Parma, Casa del Suono (3-5) Brian Eno, Light Boxes (4) Brian Eno, 77 Million Paintings, 2006
