I’m an Italian-Turkish composer, pianist, and artistic director. I was born in Rome in 1991 to an Italian mathematician and a Turkish engineer; my paternal grandmother descends from a Pasha of the Ottoman Empire. I grew up between Cihangir, Istanbul — across from the Bosphorus, that great architectural metaphor of crossing — and Latina, in central Italy. I now live and work in Milan.
I started playing piano at seven and composing at thirteen. I studied Political Science, with a thesis in Political Philosophy on the Manifesto of Ventotene — a small island off the coast of Lazio that I would later return to as an artistic residency, and where I wrote Pandataria, a record built from the stories of its inhabitants. That movement — from idea to place to sound — is how I tend to work.
My discography unfolds across more than a dozen records, including Wayfaring, Homecoming, Piano Waves (a collaboration with Pulitzer-winning journalist Ian Urbina for The Outlaw Ocean Project), Nightlight (a four-handed dialogue in the dark with Manuel Zito), From My Garden, Dreambox (Sugar Music, 2024, winner of the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Per Chi Crea grant), Weaving Sound (recorded with sound alchemist Larissa Giers at two thousand meters), Hivern and Après Hivern — a manifesto for what I call a Mediterranean minimalism.
I’ve performed across twenty-five countries and five continents, from the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome to Caracas with Venezuela’s El Sistema, from Hong Kong during the protests to Maidan-era Kiev, from Nairobi to Jakarta. In 2020 I spent two months on Red Cross quarantine ships in the port of Palermo, playing for migrants. The story was told by Ian Urbina in The Atlantic and broadcast across Italian national television.
Alongside the records, I’ve built a parallel practice as a curator and artistic director. I founded the Floating Festival, a concert series that takes place on water, and the high-altitude residency Dei Prati e delle Stelle. Since 2024 I’ve co-directed Piano City Palermo, supported by Hermès. I’ve collaborated with Missoni, Agnona, and other Italian houses on site-specific sound projects.
I don’t think of music as narrative. I think of it as a way of thickening the present, or bending its meaning.