PhEST 2024

PhEST is photography, cinema, music, art, contaminations from the Mediterranean.

Overview

From 30 August, in Monopoli, with PhEST visitors will dream. Dream is the theme chosen for the 9th edition. In the year in which the 100th anniversary of Surrealism is celebrated, the festival celebrates the dream as a disinterested game of thought and explores it in all its forms.

Under the artistic direction of Giovanni Troilo and the photography curatorship of Arianna Rinaldo, and produced by the cultural association PhEST, the festival is born out of the need to give back a voice to the thousand identities that form the “sea within the lands”, the need to redefine a new, original imagery. The necessity is not to erase the distance that the Mediterranean creates among these identities, because this sea, infact, creates them and blends them. The need is rather to stitch back together the divide between reality and its representation, beyond the theater of truth, beyond that stage of the real that the West has often set up.

When the authors of this static imagery seem to get lost and waver, what emerges with clarity is  the necessity to redefine, review everything in a non-absolute manner, in a continuously changing form. At a time when everything seems to deserve a new definition, we see the necessity to start from here, from the unsettling idea of re-writing the present over and over again.

The geographical focus zone, never limited but open to changes, expansion or zooming in, responds to the natural panorama the eyes perceive from here, from Monopoli and from the region Puglia: that is the Mediterranean, the Balkans. the Middle East, Africa and beyond.

Contemporary photography is the perfect means to trigger this reconstruction for many reasons. For the great fascination it plays on the public and for the unrest in which it lays.
While we speak, it has already changed, it continuously changes. And those who redefine it are not the photographers, the academy, the editors. It is rather the market, the technology and the users, the public itself. And thus, while we attempt to contain, preserve, and safeguard photography, its name has changed once again, already. So that those who should actually be the protagonists of this redefinition opt out, self-deceptively believing they are the ones who govern the changes. 

PhEST would like to be a small, new space where this dialogue can seek refuge. They believe that trying to redefine the borders of this rapidly changing universe, where avantguard and fiction are blending with reality, where all breaks up to reunite again, can offer a deeper understanding. This is the starting point, avvoiding all dogma, and confiding in the infidelity of the sea.

The exhibition program includes Esperanto solo show by Matthias Jung, selected by PhEST’s team on the occasion of the PhMuseum 2024 Photography Grant, and exhibitions by artists such as Jan Von Holleben, Peter Menzel, Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Pier Alfeo, Paolo Venitura, Valentina Vannicola, Fabrizio Cicero, César Dezfuli, Natalie Karpushenko, Davide Mondaldi, Richard Sharum, Ismail Ferdous, Bruce Eesly, Michalina Kacperak, Guillem Vidal, Serifa, Polina Kostanda, Nariman Darbandi, Lisa Sorgini and Warka Water.