PROGRAM 2026
june 18th, 6-9 PM
Walking counter-narratives
Start @Palazzo Ulmo, via Duomo, 55
Arrival @Comitato Città Vecchia, via Paisiello, 1
The Walk is a collective crossing of Taranto conceived as criticism to the dominant narrations limiting the territory to a sacrifice zone, to the numerous processes of exploitation and extractives (industrial, military, juristic and sporting) and to the over-determined choices.
We don’t aim to imitate the touristic behavior of the groups invading the communitarian spaces turning places and communities in consumeristic objects.That’s why the Walk will happen in small groups, accompanied by local inhabitants and people from the territory, refusing the logics of the mass-tour and the spectacle fruition of urban space.
Along the path, the people are invited to face the sensorial and daily dimension of a sacrifice zone: take a bus, reach a working place, access essential services, search spaces of decompression and care.
Through these ordinary gestures emerge the material and affective geographies of those living in the territory, highlighting inequalities, forms of resistance and chances of a future often erased by the hegemonic representations.
june 20th, 2-7 pm
Public Terrona
[Southern] Assembly
CASA VIOLA,
via Plateja, 51
Following the significant steps taken in Messina and Cosenza as part of the “The South Organizes” assembly—which opened up a space for political and social dialogue rooted in our struggles and our deepest aspirations—we were determined that Taranto should be the next step.
It’s also from here, indeed, that we want to continue to question on the contemporary forms of exploitation, on the socio-territorial hierarchies and on the socio-environmental violence crossing our Souths.
Taranto is a territory transformed in Sacrifice Zone. A community treated as waste, marked by the processes of militarization and industrialization over time through the presence of the Military Marine, ex-ILVA, the NATO bases and ENI.
We begin from Taranto because we do believe that the violence crossing this territory is not exceptional or unique. On the opposite, Taranto represents just one of our many Souths damaged by a system self-reproducing through logics of colonially, racism, utero-patriarchy, capitalism and extractivism.
Despite the historical and political differences, Taranto – as many other places in the Mediterranean and worldwide – is one of the laboratories where the production of death, grief and uprooting became a structural part of a political economy determining which bodies and which territories can be dehumanized, exploited, alienated and deprived of the chance to live freely its own land and its own body.
The Assembly aims to be first and foremost a space of encounter, relationship and collective building. A moment where we could interlace systemic analyses and lived experiences, disrupting the normalization trapping our bodies and territories in the dichotomy modernity/backwardness. At the same time, we aim to bring to light plural perspectives starting from the experiences of our Souths.
We do not consider the Souths a uniform entity nor a simple geographical site, but a political and material positioning in order to read the structural dimension of the socio-ecological crisis and to build new practices of organization, complicity and transformation.
We aim to question how to formulate imageries, possible practices and futures, building a world fitting with our needs, desires and chances of liberatione
june 19th-21st, 8.30 am-8 pm
Cattive Acque / Dark Waters
CASA VIOLA,
via Plateja, 51
Public talk, June 21st, 6.30 PM with:
— Giuditta Pellegrini
— Vittoria Torsello
— Ekpali Saint
CONVOCATORIA ECOLOGISTA will host the exhibition Cattive Acque / Dark Waters, [a visual enquiry by Giuditta Pellegrini, Ekpali Saint e Vittoria Torsello. The project came about from an international research funded by Journalismfund Europe. It documents through images the unpair relationship between the local communities and ENI, the energetic giant partly state-owned, giving light to the dramatic social and environmental consequences of exctractivism in these territories.
In Basilicata, the region offering the 25% of spring water in the Southern Italy, more than 140.000 inhabitants suffered from heavy water rationing between 2024 and 2025. The dried up dam Camastra is at the core of the claims of citizens and experts: they address the oil digging and the water course deviation made by ENI, heavily worsening an already dire situation due to the climate crisis.]
Cattive Acque / Dark Waters crosses these territories relating exctractivism, ecological crisis and material life conditions, through images and witnesses questioning environment, exploitation and right to water.
The show will be open between June 19th-21st and will closure with a public debate with the authors.