Welcome to Asconology

A living tribute to Ascona’s radical soul

Asconology is a new cultural initiative — part festival, part academy, part creative residency — dedicated to studying and reawakening the visionary spirit of Ascona.

Each year, Asconology will host conferences, performances, exhibitions, and workshops featuring international artists, scholars, and cultural innovators. Together, we’ll explore the stories, ideas, people, and institutions that made Ascona a legendary crossroads of art, thought, and transformation.

Inspired by places like Black Mountain College and creative sanctuaries such as Yaddo, Asconology is not only about remembering — it’s about rekindling. Like John Andrew Rice once envisioned:

“a place where proven educational methods and new methods tried out in a purely experimental spirit could be freely used.”

From the mountain that once gave refuge to free spirits, we imagine a new one:
White Mountain in Ascona — a space for today’s thinkers, artists, and dreamers to build the next utopia.

Because utopias don’t last.
So we create new ones.