BJÖRK’S CORNUCOPIA: THE DIGITAL THEATRE OF THE SACRED FUTURE

When Björk creates, she doesn’t just compose, she builds entire ecosystems. Cornucopia, her most ambitious live performance to date, now turned into a film directed by Ísold Uggadóttir, is a concert movie as well as a full-blown reimagining of what music can be when technology, theatre, and biology fuse into one living organism.

Premiering in Milan on November 19 at Ariosto Anteo SpazioCinema, with an opening talk between music journalist Tommaso Toma and Gloria Maria Cappelletti, editor-in-chief of RED-EYE and lecturer at NABA, Cornucopia embodies what the 21st century needs most: a new mythology of sound, one that reclaims technology as ritual and digital culture as something spiritual.

At its core, Cornucopia is what Björk calls digital theatre. The artist spent a decade experimenting with 360° visuals and sound, from the tactile apps of Biophilia to the immersive VR landscapes of Vulnicura, before deciding to bring this digital cosmos back to the physical stage. “It was about taking the visuals out of a VR headset,” she explains, “and putting them on a 19th-century stage, making them physical and alive, but keeping the circular energy.”

The result? A breathtaking choreography of sound and image. Songs like Arisen My Senses unfold through a sequence of 27 kinetic screens opening and closing in perfect rhythm, while harp MIDI notes sync precisely with digital straws in Tobias Gremmler’s animations with a blooming ecosystem of light, motion, and code. Then everything flips: Body Memory dissolves the digital in favor of pure organic grandeur with a 50-piece choir, seven-meter organ pipes, a magnetic harp, and a circular flute. It’s an alchemical shift from data to breath, from algorithm to flesh.

Björk calls this balance “the best of all worlds”: hi-res fantastical animation meets lo-fi live theatre. It’s a reminder that technology doesn’t erase the human, instead it amplifies it. The performance oscillates between intimacy and vastness, between glitch and hymn, constantly expanding the boundaries of what performance art can hold.

Even the name Cornucopia carries this vision. It wasn’t tied to any single album, but imagined as an evolving vessel, “a sci-fi island in the sky with soil and fungus roots underneath it,” as Björk describes it. It’s an ecosystem of abundance, where past and future entangle: digital spores growing from ancient myths.

For Milan’s creative community and for NABA’s new generation of artists, designers, and digital thinkers, this event becomes a manifesto of hybrid creativity. NABA’s identity has always been rooted in the dialogue between the material and the digital, between craft and code. By presenting Cornucopia, the Academy reaffirms its experimental spirit as a place where innovation and tradition coexist, where technology serves imagination without severing its link to heritage and matter. Only by holding this balance, by honoring what is tangible while exploring what is possible, can we move consciously into the future. In this sense, Björk’s Cornucopia is more than a film: it is a journey through that very threshold, where art, sound, and technology converge into a new human mythology between frequencies, between science and emotion, pixels and pulse. Cornucopia is the space where all those worlds converge, in a hypnotic bloom of sound, code, and cosmic empathy.

If the future has a sound, it probably sings in Björk’s language, half-human, half-electric, and absolutely alive.

Björk: Cornucopia – Live
Directed by Ísold Uggadóttir
Screening: Ariosto Anteo spazioCinema Milan on November 19th at 21:15

Get Your Ticket HERE https://www.spaziocinema.info/milano/eventi-e-rassegne/bjork-cornucopia-live-di-uggadoor-incontro-con-ospiti-in-sala

RED•EYE WORLD