ECONOMIC IMPACT STUDY
GAIA BANFI
Gaia Banfi is an Italian singer, songwriter, musician and producer who works through experimentation. She is currently one of the emerging voices in Europe’s pop, experimental, and independent electronic music scene. Her musical approach blends electronic influences, acoustic elements, and distorted sounds, with the voice as the central axis of her artistic expression and as a space for constant exploration. In 2025 she released her album La Maccaia and has since been touring across Italy and Europe.
Almost ten years ago, Calcutta and Giorgio Poi sang that “Italian music / was no longer fashionable music.” It would only move you if you were an Italian expat between 25 and 37 years old who missed parmigiano cheese. Today, the number of Italian expats keeps growing, but that is not why their music is once again at the cutting edge. Take GAIA BANFI as an example.
Photo from the artist’s Substack. There, BANFI says she feels closer “to an animal crossing the forest / than to a human eating meat.”
Situated somewhere between pop, 1970s singer-songwriter music, experimental electronics, and musical posthumanism (is that even a thing?), BANFI’s project is also image, text, and materiality. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but all you need to do is listen to her to understand it.
Ivet Zwatrzko
Predoctoral Researcher in Comparative Literature