PhEST 2025

PhEST turns 10, and to mark this milestone, this year the festival kicks off in August: from 8 August to 16 November, Monopoli will once again—and more than ever—become a stage for visual experiences, encounters, and creativity.

Overview

“We are a great peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean sea and at times we forget about it.” Franco Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano, 1996.

PhEST is photography, cinema, music, art, contaminations from the Mediterranean. It 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. 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. We would like to be a small, new space where this dialogue can seek refuge.

We 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. PhEST entrusted the artistic direction to Giovanni Troilo and the photography curatorship to Arianna Rinaldo. PhEST is produced by the cultural association PhEST.

More info coming soon.