VI ed. Nomadic Art Festival 2026 - Áṣẹ, waŋarr, mudāriʿ (The Present)

Áṣẹ, waŋarr, mudāriʿ (The Present) is the sixth edition of the Nomadic Art Festival (Festival dell’Arte Nomadica), taking place in Ferentino from 2 to 6 September 2026. After a first trilogy devoted to generations in exile and to the categories of time and space, the Festival’s second cycle explores the attributes of the nomad. Following Nòstoi, the chapter of return, nostalgia and the lost home, and Epoché, the suspension of memory and the opening towards the unexpected, the sixth edition investigates the present as something unfinished, unstable and unable to coincide fully with itself. 

The title brings together three different ways of thinking about presence and action. Áṣẹ evokes the power of words, gestures and rituals to act upon reality; waŋarr points to an ancestral time that does not remain in the past but is continuously reactivated through song, movement and territory; the Arabic mudāriʿ names an action still in progress, an imperfect and incomplete present. The edition therefore asks how archives and techniques for recording the present may be undone. Every record is unstable and can be altered by the political, linguistic and algorithmic powers that interpret it. The present also belongs to those who are absent: the distant, the displaced, the dead and those who are not yet here. No law or history can claim to be just if it excludes those who cannot be present to speak for themselves. Rather than a single present, the Festival imagines a tout-monde: a field of plural voices, places and temporalities. Palestine becomes a central figure of this active present - not only as memory or loss, but as a language of persistence that continues to act when there is no secure future and no intact past to return to. Like photography, every attempt to fix the present already records an absence: the image certifies that what was there is no longer there. Yet, within that impression of presence, something always escapes capture. 

The programme unfolds through the Festival’s different sections. Homo ludens opens the edition at the Roman Theatre. ARCHE extends from the Roman Market and the Crypt of Santa Lucia to the Vicolo Sistitilio gallery and the cryptoporticus, with “Documento” and “Round and Round. And round”. FUTURA presents “Province infestate”, with Filippo Cerri and Elena Giorgiana Mirabelli, followed by John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness. La sabbia delle urne brings together poetry, research writing and performance, including Irene Sabetta, Samuele Maffei, Luigi Riccio, Francesco Maria Terzago, Flavia Papadia, Marco Giovenale, Michele Zaffarano, Luciano Funetta and Inverso Poesia. Andrea Capodimonte presents Esecuzione, a project on executable poetry. Radici Sonore and Semenzaie vagabonde include SCAVALCARE with Stalker Lab, the Shamanic Jazz Orchestra, Prossimità Vocali and Jonida Prifti. The sixth Trance(h)umansa, the Festival’s itinerant theatrical rite, moves from Via Antiche Terme to the Roman Theatre. The final evening brings together Najwan Darwish and Luisa Morgantini of Assopace Palestina, followed by screenings from Nazra Animada. Organised by Materia Creativa APS. Partners: Centro Scritture, Inverso Poesia, Neutopia and Ottovolante APS.