Magazzino Brancaccio is a space devoted to contemporary art, experimental music and performance. The warehouse is located in a 2000 square meter property confiscated from organized crime, and opened to the public for the first time on June 16, 2018, almost twenty years after its seizure. Today it represents a new permanent service for the neighborhood and the city. Magazzino Brancaccio hosts a calendar of events, self-run activities, and collaborations with local projects and organizations.

Confiscated Properties: Architecture, Ideology, and Performance (16.06-04.11.2018) aims to appropriate and permeate a confiscated property through a calendar of community-based performances. The Great Learning Orchestra music collective (Stockholm) has invited UK-based composers Tony Harris and Barry Russell to form a calendar of participatory events and experimental music performances for confiscated properties in Palermo, from June to November 2018. The project re-thinks the role of properties seized from organized crime, in relation to the history of the city, the protagonists of the counterculture, together with the organizations and self-run groups in Palermo over the last 40 years. A series of preliminary events has accompanied the project since March 2017.
Curated by Valentina Sansone.

Stockholm-based collective The Great Learning Orchestra has been organizing educational activities and music events for almost twenty years. Essentially a network where musicians from a diverse range of backgrounds come together to perform exploratory music, where listening is a central focus, the ensemble is self-selecting from a list of over 100 musicians for each new project.
The GLO was founded in 1999 by Leif Jordansson and Pelle Halvarsson and since its inception has performed a large variety of contemporary and experimental works. This has included a spontaneously-orchestrated 24-hour performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations, together with highly successful performances of Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet and The Sinking of the Titanic (both under the direction of the composer) and Terry Riley’s little-known early work Tread on the Trail, again with the composer directing. In 2006, the orchestra gave the first full orchestral performance of Lou Reed’s legendary Metal Machine Music, in a new arrangement by Ulrich Krieger, and a concert version of the soundtrack of The Texas Chainsaw Masacre, complete with live chainsaws and screaming choir. Recent performances have included John Cage’s Imaginary Landscapes at Moderna Museet and Christian Marclay’s Graffiti Composition at Bonniers Konsthall.
The orchestra’s name is derived from the British composer Cornelius Cardew’s work The Great Learning, and the ensemble is in many ways influenced by his legacy of openness, experimentation and participation.

Robin McGinley is a musician, curator and educator. Associate Professor in Curating Art at Stockholm University, he has been part of GLO since 2000.

Tony Harris is a performer, composer, educator. He is currently Dean at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP), London.

Barry Russell is a British composer, performer and animateur. He has directed education and community projects for major venues and orchestras across Europe.