Conference Program

In cultural ecosystems increasingly shaped by media dynamics, political pressure, and reconfigured funding structures, Italian performing arts festivals often operate as arenas where artistic production, public discourse, and institutional power intersect. Within these environments, festivals can function as spaces in which cultural and political negotiation takes place, and also as spaces of protest — framing them as territories of resistance and artistic contestation.

This proposal investigates how a performing arts festival may become a site of resistance within contemporary cultural policy and media ecologies. Focusing on Santarcangelo Festival (Rimini, Italy) — one of the longest-running experimental theatre festivals in Europe — I analyse four key editions: 1985 (directed by Roberto Bacci), 2015 (Silvia Bottiroli), 2018 (Eva Neklyaeva and Lisa Gilardino), and the most recent 2025 edition (Tomasz Kireńczuk).

Each of these editions marks a moment in which artistic programming interacts with broader political and media environments. The 1985 edition became emblematic due to a violent media scandal and institutional backlash surrounding the performance Genet a Tangeri by Magazzini Criminali. The editions of 2015 and 2018 were characterised by controversies involving accusations of moral offence and media-driven censorship. Meanwhile, the 2025 edition unfolded in a context of severe cuts to public cultural funding in Italy. During the festival opening, artistic director publicly defended the autonomy of cultural institutions and freedom of artistic programming, transforming the festival into a space of mobilization and resistance in support of artistic labour and freedom of expression.

Through this comparative analysis, the paper examines how festival programming negotiates tensions between artistic autonomy, institutional governance, and audience participation. Programming decisions, labour conditions, and funding structures become part of a broader cultural infrastructure that shapes how artistic knowledge circulates and how artistic practices are legitimised or contested.

The paper therefore asks: do different artistic directors and their programmes refrain from imposing meaning on political bodies and artistic practices? What strategies for democratising artistic knowledge emerge through festival curation? By analysing labour production, programming, and funding structures, the research explores what forms of resistance are enacted and what potential escapes exist from the economy of debt, exceptionality, discontinuity, precarity, and inaccessibility of artistic work (Kunst 2024).

Drawing on Bataille’s reflections on transgression, the paper proposes that cultural programming can operate simultaneously as contestation and transgression — a space where political and aesthetic boundaries are continuously negotiated (Bataille 1986). Rather than abolishing taboos, festivals may suspend or displace them, revealing persistent tensions between artistic autonomy and institutional control.

Instead of simply mapping cultural policies, this study interrogates the fractures, contradictions, and unresolved conflicts that shape the relationship between performance, power, and the processes of subjectivation that these dynamics impose (Butler 1997).