BETWEEN LAND AND SEA
PALERMO
Transnational encounters between art and politics
16 JUNE TO 1 JULY 2023
BETWEEN LAND AND SEA is a series of transnational encounters in arts and politics that examine and critically reflect the existing connections between port cities and their intertwined histories linked by global migration and trade.
After the editions hosted by L’Art Rue in Tunis and Theater Bremen in Germany, BETWEEN LAND AND SEA returns to Palermo in 2023 for its fourth edition. The encounters address some burning socio-economic and environmental challenges with a series of artistic productions and political gatherings that are both locally embedded and strengthening transnational links, inventing new ways to come together across borders and develop solidarity narratives. The present edition focuses on three Sicilian artists and their work, while also opening the island towards long-term collaboration with artists and researchers from the neighbouring Mediterranean and the African continent through a multidisciplinary program curated by Eva-Maria Bertschy and Izabela Moren across theatre, dance, photography, design, sustainability, performance and music. The artists look closely at different clues that the city of Palermo and its surroundings points to them, following its rhizomatic relationships to other places in the world.
Francesco Bellina‘s Pray for Seamen is a great example of the overall approach of the festival. Although the fishermen of the Sicilian, Tunisian, and Ghanaian coasts are a central component of the local economy and cultural identity, they are all exposed to the same global dynamics. Bellina gives us a diverse panorama of three landscapes by documenting their similar practices and struggles. Sicilian video artist Genny Petrotta, meanwhile, tells the story of the Repubblica Contadina (the peasant republic) that was founded in her hometown of Piana degli Albanesi towards the end of the Second World War under the leadership of her grand uncle Giacomo Petrotta – and evokes its violent repression. The School of Water Scarcity, an artistic research program curated by Izabela Moren that initiated by exploring water mismanagement and hydric stress experienced by small farmers in Sicily and Tunisia today, involving cultural practitioners to formulate shared strategies around the preservation of biodiversity, indigenous and non-indigenous local varieties, ancient water collection techniques and food sovereignty. In parallel, the designer Eliza Collins has researched in depth the water situation in Palermo. With WET ZONES, she designed a kitchen prototype that confronts a not-so-distant future where localised water recycling presents a solution that allows for this finite resource’s regulated consumption, disposal and reclamation. With her long-term study on the South-East Coast, Irene Coppola re-inhabits Palermo’s main coastline and involves the inhabitants of the adjacent neighbourhood and regular beachgoers to reinvent a collective use of a wasteland destroyed by mismanagement, which will undergo drastic transformations in the coming years. She will introduce her firs cinematographic work MAMMELLONI in co-direction with the filmmaker Ruben Monterosso. A guest from the first edition returns: the star Coupé Décalé Ordinateur from the Ivory Coast. Together with Ivorian dancer and singer Annick Choco and German thespian Monika Gintersdorfer, they develop a performance on dance, football and performance in a two-week workshop with a group of young people from Palermo. Rossella Biscotti will present her extensive Journey that began when she was awarded with a 20-ton block of Carrara marble. In May 2021, the marble block was loaded onto a boat that sailed on a symbolic route between Italy, Malta, Tunisia and Libya, releasing it into the Mediterranean Sea. With the sound artist Attila Faravelli she will present the project in a listening session of some of the recorded sounds.
The musical programme is concentrated between Friday 23 and Saturday 24: on the first evening, Agostino will trigger the rhythms of Tecnopizzica, a mutant and electronic form that distorts Apulian folk music. On Saturday 24, Brazilian musician and researcher Pedro Oliveira will unleash the latent potential of the human timbre in a sound performance that uses, by turning them against themselves, current voice-recognition technologies, plagued by racial prejudice and used to reinforce borders. This will be followed by a live set by Sara Persico, a musician trained in the underground scene in Naples, but stationed in Berlin for years now. She will be in Palermo for a short residency with Studio Rizoma and will play a hybrid and iridescent set, but with the dark, precise and ruthless sound that characterises her vision.
Read more about individual productions in the EDITORIAL section of our website.
PROGRAMME
Friday, 16 June, ECOMUSEO MARE MEMORIA VIVA
18:00 EXHIBITION OPENING – Francesco Bellina: PRAY FOR SEAMEN
Saturday, 17 June, ATERRATERRA LAB
19:00 ROUND TABLE + APERITIF – Aterraterra: BETWEEN FACING THE CHANGE AND MAKING A CHANGE
Friday, 23 June, ECOMUSEO MARE MEMORIA VIVA
18:00 OPENING INSTALLATION – Irene Coppola: FIRE-WORKS (Place: Foce del fiume Oreto)
18:30 TASTING SESSION – SCHOOL OF WATER SCARCITY X Eliza Collin: WET ZONES Kitchen Activation
Friday, 23 June, SECRET PLACE
23:00 CONCERT – Agostino
Saturday, 24 June, ECOMUSEO MARE MEMORIA VIVA
20:00 — 22:00 INSTALLATION – Irene Coppola: FIRE-WORKS
20:30 LISTENING SESSION – Rossella Biscotti: THE JOURNEY
Saturday, 24 June, STAND FLORIO
21:30 CONCERT – Pedro Oliveira: DESMONTE
22:30 CONCERT – Sara Persico
Sunday, 25 June, ECOMUSEO MARE MEMORIA VIVA
20:00 — 23:00 INSTALLATION – Irene Coppola: FIRE-WORKS (Place: Foce del fiume Oreto)
20:30 ASSEMBLY & SCREENING – Irene Coppola and Ruben Monterosso: MAMMELLONI
Wednesday, 28 June, COMPLESSO MONUMENTALE DI SANTA CHIARA
21:00 PERFORMANCE – La Fleur: THE GREAT PROMISE – A performance about football, dance and showbiz
Thursday, 29 June, COMPLESSO MONUMENTALE DI SANTA CHIARA
21:00 PERFORMANCE – La Fleur: THE GREAT PROMISE – A performance about football, dance and showbiz
Saturday, 1 July, FORMER PRISON OF PIANA DEGLI ALBANESI
20:30 INSTALLATION & LECTURE – Genny Petrotta: KUMETA
