Summer Unfolds

From 16 to 26 July 2026, Centrale Fies_Research Centre for Contemporary Performance Practices opens its doors to the public for ten consecutive days, presenting the outcomes of its year-long projects and the main strands of research developed throughout the season. The 2026 summer programme unfolds through exhibitions, lectures, performance practices, research devices, convivial gatherings and public activations, shaping a heterogeneous cultural landscape in constant transformation.

The programme is structured around a series of public moments, each connected to a distinct research project. It begins with LIVE WORKS SUMMIT + Agitu Ideo Gudeta Fellowship (17–19 July), followed by The Sparks Return (22 July), and concludes with LOVE IS POLITICAL (23–26 July).

During the opening weekend of the programme, from 16 to 19 July, LIVE WORKS SUMMIT presents the final performances of the 2025 edition of LIVE WORKS, one of Italy’s longest-running open calls for performance, distinguished by its decolonial curatorial approach, alongside the project selected for the fifth edition of the Agitu Ideo Gudeta Fellowship, a research fellowship dedicated to racialised artists holding Italian citizenship. LIVE WORKS operates as a platform offering concrete support to emerging artists through a well-established network of institutional partners, including Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Palazzo Grassi, Tanzfabrik Berlin, Hangar Barcelona and Operaestate Festival Veneto. By fostering encounters and dialogue between artists and the national and international cultural ecosystem, the programme creates opportunities for exchange, collaboration and professional development. The festival therefore offers audiences the opportunity to experience the Italian premieres of works by a new generation of artists from across the world.

An entire evening, 22 July, is dedicated to The Sparks Return, curated by Stefania Santoni, Pierangelo Giacomuzzi and P. Parenti. Conceived by Virginia Sommadossi and Elisa Di Liberato, the project is supported by the Laboratorio di Creatività Contemporanea programme, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. Bringing together a network of young cultural activists working across the valleys of Trentino, the project explores new forms of collaborative curating, examining the relationship between culture, landscape, belonging and social transformation. Through assemblies, working groups, talks and a communal dinner, every element of the programme is conceived as an open invitation to public participation.

Finally, LOVE IS POLITICAL (23–26 July 2026) brings the summer programme to a close. Following Enduring Love, Evolving Love and Radical Love, the 2026 edition places the political nature of relationships at its centre. What happens between people never remains confined to the private sphere: it leaves traces, creates possibilities and helps shape the world we share. LOVE IS POLITICAL is grounded in the belief that love, friendship, alliance and care are practices capable of producing tangible social and political effects. It turns its attention to relationships that evolve over time while continuing to generate trust and collective imagination: those that connect artists, curators, audiences and places, allowing artistic research to become part of everyday life. Some companies return to Centrale Fies, carrying with them the traces of a shared history; alongside them, a new generation of artists and researchers presents works and processes still in development, inviting audiences into an ongoing exploration of the heterogeneous continuities that continue to transform people, practices and imaginaries.

On 16 July, Centrale Fies opens its summer season by bringing into public view the sustained and in-depth research carried out throughout the year, developed through an ongoing international dialogue and nurtured by an extensive programme of artistic residencies hosted within PASSO NORD – Regional Centre for Artistic Residencies of Trentino–Alto Adige/Südtirol.

“Each year, opening the outcomes of Centrale Fies’ research to the public renews a commitment that has shaped this place since its inception: to make culture a space for relationships and critical thought,” says Dino Sommadossi, President of Centrale Fies. “We have never considered the territory simply as a context in which to operate, but rather as a partner to grow with, engage and imagine new trajectories. This is why we continue to support research, production and collaborative processes that bring together different skills, perspectives and backgrounds. It is work that requires trust, vision and time, but over the years it has helped establish Centrale Fies as an internationally recognised site of artistic experimentation, while remaining deeply rooted in its capacity to generate cultural and social value for its local context. It is precisely in this balance between openness to the world and attention to place that we recognise the deepest meaning of our work.”

PROGRAMME

Thursday 16 July marks the opening of LIVE WORKS SUMMIT (16–19 July 2026), the culminating moment of a year-long process of scouting, supporting emerging artists and mapping the most innovative and transdisciplinary practices in contemporary performance. The 2026 summer programme at Centrale Fies opens with Monia Ben Hamouda’s solo exhibition, curated by Simone Frangi and Barbara Boninsegna, on view from 16 to 26 July, daily from 6.00 pm to midnight.

The exhibition opening is accompanied by MoonJar, a performance by Kat Válastur & Aho Ssan (from 8.00 pm), a poetic encounter between sound and movement. Drawing on ancient creation myths and the materiality of clay, Válastur and Ssan transform the performance space into a magical vessel that generates sound. Within this ritual of renewal, ceramic works by artist and ceramicist Latika Nehra—resembling relics and bones—become active presences. The choreography unfolds in dialogue with these objects and the sounds they evoke, summoning echoes of prehistoric ancestors. Válastur’s spiralling and circular movements trace arcs that recall both the cycles of the moon and the helical twists of DNA.

The evening concludes with a live set by Aho Ssan (from 9.00 pm), the Paris-based electronic composer and sound designer. His practice combines intricately layered electronic textures with rhythmic structures to explore memory, identity and lived experience. His work has been presented internationally, including at Lincoln Center, New York.

Together, Monia Ben Hamouda’s exhibition, MoonJar by Kat Válastur & Aho Ssan, and Aho Ssan’s live set compose a shared reflection on the tensions between the material and the immaterial, exploring the ways in which our sensory world continually reaches towards the metaphysical.

Monia Ben Hamouda’s solo exhibition invites audiences to inhabit complexity, embrace what resists definition, and recognise language as one of the places where the inheritances that shape us are continually sedimented. Born in Milan to a Tunisian family, Ben Hamouda has developed a practice that moves between the histories of Middle Eastern and Western European art, approaching language as a living entity—one that shifts, evolves and constantly generates new meanings. At the core of her work lies the legacy of Islamic calligraphy, passed down by her father. Rather than preserving it as a fixed tradition, she treats it as a dynamic material from which new forms and new possibilities for relation can emerge. Monumental sculptures made of steel, sand and spices inhabit the exhibition space, transforming it into a landscape of signs, scents, colours and presences. In dialogue with the tradition of aniconism, which privileges text and ornament over figurative representation, Ben Hamouda creates works that resist singular interpretation. Drawing inspiration from Najdi poetry, a vernacular poetic tradition that emerged in the Arabian Peninsula during the sixteenth century, she imagines language as something that travels across time and geography—transforming, migrating and enduring. At Centrale Fies, large suspended sculptures appear to defy gravity, while sand gradually encroaches upon the exhibition space, subjecting the works to a slow process of transformation. Rather than evoking ruin, this gesture becomes a way of reflecting on time, the stratification of history, and the ways in which memory is preserved, transmitted and, at times, allowed to disappear.

Eight artists selected through the 2025 international open call by Centrale Fies’ curatorial board—Barbara Boninsegna, Simone Frangi, Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfau’ and Justin Randolph Thompson, with executive curation by Maria Chemello—present performances developed over the course of a year of artistic residencies, mentorship and research. From 17 to 19 July, audiences will have the opportunity to experience a series of original works. Pina Danila Gambettola presents The Third Bodies (17–19 July, 6.30 pm), a performance inspired by the late nineteenth-century encounters between the celebrated medium Eusapia Palladino and the anthropologist Cesare Lombroso. At 8.00 pm, Kristina Kusmina Dreit presents Druzhba sent from my iPhone, a performance and installation that draws subtle parallels between the visual language of Socialist Realist painting and the gestures and poses found in the artist’s own family photographs.

The guest artist on Friday 17 July is Tiziano Cruz, presenting Wayqeycuna, the final chapter of his trilogy Tres Maneras de Cantarle a una Montaña. Through a series of poetic gestures, Cruz intertwines childhood memories from the rural landscapes of northern Argentina with political reflections on the art market and class privilege. The programme also features Juan Yung Han’s Picking on the Waves, an animated work exploring how historical events leave lasting traces of movement within bodies and matter.

Also presented as part of the summer programme is Luc Ndikubwimana, recipient of the Agitu Ideo Gudeta Fellowship, a research fellowship conceived as a form of affirmative action and, since 2025, developed in partnership with Palazzo Grassi and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The fellowship addresses the lack of diversity within the arts by responding to the material and symbolic barriers generated through processes of racialisation. Ndikubwimana presents Re-Veil (Saturday 18 July, 7.30 pm), a work that interrogates the archives we draw upon every day, exposing the extent to which they continue to lack a decolonial perspective.

The evening’s guest artists, Katerina Andreou and Mélissa Guex, come together for SHOUT TWICE, a vibrant performance in which the scream becomes an act of transformation. Later, in the Sala Comando (10.30 pm), Publik Universal Frxnd presents Born to Lose, a new sculptural installation and sonic exploration of death understood as a transition between states. Combining music, specially crafted wooden organ pipes, choral singing and activated sculptures, the work unfolds as an immersive environment. With REMAINS, Tim Bartel investigates the inherent ambiguity of language through garments, constructed objects and performance.

On Sunday 19 July, multidisciplinary artist Abdul Halik Azeez, from Colombo, Sri Lanka, explores the intersections of late capitalism, colonialism, and the processes through which memory, history and identity politics are constructed. In Authentic Narrative of the Curious Espionage of an Unnamed Moor, Professor Ifurbad Imurdad inaugurates the Intergalactic Conference on Mnemonic Archaeology (ICOMA), presenting the latest research from the Mnemonics Archaeology Department (MAD) of the Institute of Consummate Memory. Meanwhile, Eleni Roberts Kazouri and Vladimir Babinchuk present STRIKE, Echoes of a Struggle, in which three performers work from the persistence of a single street image within a long concrete space that unfolds like a corridor.

Bringing the LIVE WORKS SUMMIT weekend to a close is guest artist Alif Hilal (fka Lyra Pramuk), whose performance evokes a rare form of music rooted in devotion, deep listening, contemplation and transformation: an experience that unfolds almost as a ritual. American multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin—vocalist, composer, producer, DJ, performer and astrologer—Alif Hilal combines the limitless expressive potential of the human voice with the transformative possibilities of technology. 

Throughout the weekend, Free School sessions offer a series of public talks and lectures designed to illuminate the cultural frameworks and often invisible processes that underpin Centrale Fies’ programme. Conceived as moments of expansion, these encounters invite audiences to engage with the ideas, methodologies and critical questions that shape the institution’s artistic research. The programme begins on Friday 17 July with a lecture by Angeliki Tzortzakaki, a writer, curator and educator born in Crete and based in Amsterdam, whose collaborative and performative practice has been widely presented and published across the Netherlands and internationally. On Saturday 18 July, Hannah Proctor, historian at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, joins Centrale Fies while working on two forthcoming publications: Communist Cases, examining the social sciences in the United States during the Cold War, and a history of the “long 1990s”. On Sunday 19 July, Costanza Spina, who has lived in France for the past fifteen years and studied at Sciences Po Rennes, concludes the programme. She is the founder of Manifesto XXI, one of France’s first queer media platforms.

Read more and find full programme here.

For the past four years, Centrale Fies has also pursued a new ticketing policy based on the principle of Pay What You Want. Alongside a substantial programme of free events, audiences can choose between four contribution levels based not on social categories, but on the kind of relationship they wish to establish with the institution: Explore (€5), Appreciate (€10), Love (€15) and Support (€20). A dedicated campsite, Camping Fies, is available on request as a base for university and academy students from all disciplines. To make the venue more accessible, Centrale Fies will also coordinate car-sharing initiatives and practical travel information through its social media channels. Throughout the festival, the park will host a pop-up bookshop by Libreria DuePunti (Trento), featuring a curated selection of fiction and critical writing connected to the research and practices of the artists participating in this Summer Edition.