PhEST 2026

After ten years, PhEST enters a period of transformation, bridging past and future. The 2026 edition explores “What if?” as an invitation to question the present, imagine alternative scenarios, and rethink the possibilities of contemporary visual culture.

Overview

PhEST is a festival of photography, cinema, music, and art rooted in the Mediterranean and its many interconnected identities. Since its foundation, the festival has explored the relationship between images and reality, creating a space where different perspectives, cultures, and forms of visual expression can meet.

The 2026 edition, centred around the theme What if?, approaches the question as a creative and critical device: a way to suspend the certainty of reality, imagine divergent futures, and make visible what does not yet exist. Rather than offering an escape from the present, PhEST invites artists and audiences to reflect on the possibilities that emerge when established narratives are questioned.

Through photography and expanded visual practices, the festival explores how images can respond to a rapidly changing world. It welcomes diverse forms of expression — from photography and video to illustration, collage, animation, painting, sculpture, and installation — that investigate contemporary transformations and new ways of imagining the future.

Rooted in Monopoli, Puglia, and looking towards the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and beyond, PhEST continues to explore the relationship between places, identities, and representations.

Directed by Giovanni Troilo and with photography curatorship of Arianna Rinaldo, the new edition includes artists such as Marek Kita, Victorine Alisse, Metropolis, Sergey Melnitchenko, Noway Recordings, Sara Angelucci, Francesco Conti, Chinky Shukla, Joan Fontcuberta, Sara Munari, Juno Calypso, Chloé Azzopardi, Harri Pälviranta, Roger Ballen, and Vivian Maier.

On 7 August, Giorgia Angiuli returns to Monopoli to open the 2026 edition of PhEST with a performance blending electronics, vocals, analog instruments, and soundscapes in Piazza Palmieri from 10pm, free entry. Plus, the opening weekend also includes the screening of the shortlisted projects from the PhMuseum 2026 Photography Grant.