{"id":8176,"date":"2025-07-15T15:05:02","date_gmt":"2025-07-15T13:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monopolitourism.com\/?p=8176"},"modified":"2025-07-15T15:19:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-15T13:19:30","slug":"phest-international-festival-of-photograpy-and-art-monopoli-08-08-16-11-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monopolitourism.com\/en\/2025\/07\/15\/phest-international-festival-of-photograpy-and-art-monopoli-08-08-16-11-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"PhEST – International Festival of Photograpy and Art | MONOPOLI 08\/08-16\/11 2025\u200b"},"content":{"rendered":"

From August 8 to November 16, 2025, PhEST \u2013 International Festival of Photography and Art celebrates its tenth edition in Monopoli, Puglia, with an extraordinary program of exhibitions, residencies, installations, and special projects.<\/strong> This edition expands in time and space, looking to the future while rooted in ten years of visions, relationships, and transformations. To celebrate its tenth anniversary, PhEST hosts several extraordinary exhibitions that mark a turning point in the festival’s history.<\/p>\n

Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos –<\/strong> The Reason of Monsters. For the first time in Southern Italy, PhEST presents an exhibition dedicated to one of the greatest masters of Western imagination. On display is the complete series of the famous Caprichos: 80 etchings created by Goya between 1797 and 1799, which with a satirical approach and dreamlike vision lay bare the contradictions of Spanish society of the time, anticipating the most restless and modern aspects of contemporary art. The Capricci will be exhibited courtesy of the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia, which will be present during the opening. The exhibition is curated by Roberto Lacarbonara and Giovanni Troilo.<\/p>\n

Yorgos Lanthimos, Jitter Period.<\/strong> A first-ever exhibition in Italy, PhEST presents an exhibition dedicated to the visual universe of Yorgos Lanthimos, one of the most visionary and award-winning directors of contemporary cinema (The Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things). Lanthimos also reveals his fingerprint in his photographs, capable of constructing powerful, enigmatic, and suspended images. The exhibition brings together a selection of the director’s most recent shots, which reveal the same sense of the absurd, theatrical composition, and narrative tension that permeates his cinema. An intimate and parallel exploration of his imagination, where photography and cinema intertwine in a coherent, elegant, and unsettling universe. Curated by Jo\u00e3o Linneu, the exhibition is organized in collaboration with Fotofestiwal.<\/p>\n

Martin Parr, Pleased to Meet You.<\/strong> The 10th edition’s exhibition, curated by Giovanni Troilo and Arianna Rinaldo, is dedicated to the great British photographer. An ironic, lucid, and profoundly human portrait of our society. Parr will be in Monopoli on September 27th and 28th for a public meeting and a screening of the documentary film “I am Martin Parr,” in collaboration with Wanted Cinema.<\/p>\n

The 10th edition of PhEST is a collaborative journey into humanity’s present, told through the eyes of photographers, visual artists, conceptual authors, experimenters, and storytellers. A human atlas that traverses places, languages, and sensibilities, in an emotional geography that ranges from the Mediterranean to the Moon, from rural landscapes to interior constellations.<\/p>\n

Offering a first extensive planetary catalogue, which plays with the familiar tropes and clich\u00e9s of travel and draws on universal themes of human experience, is Sam Youkilis for the first time in Italy with the exhibition Under the Sun, in which the New York photographer pioneers a new form of visual narration that uses iPhone and Instagram to create and share his original contemporary wunderkammer of the everyday. The exhibition, curated by Sophia Greiff and with video and audio editing by Jens L\u00fcstraeten, is produced by the C\/O Berlin Foundation. Aleksandra Mir, with an exhibition spread across the homes and shops of the historic center of Monopoli, takes Christian iconography on an unusual journey into sidereal space, poised between faith and science. \u201cIf angels and astronauts share the same sky,\u201d the Swedish-American artist asks, \u201cisn\u2019t it time to introduce them?\u201d American photographer Dylan Hausthor explores in black and white the ritual, rural, and ancestral dimensions of human life in What the Rain Might Bring. Gregg Segal exhibits his work on consumption and the environment, where subjects are portrayed surrounded by their weekly waste, in a powerful gesture of awareness, while Deanna Dikeman, with The Place of Ordinary Moments, presents an intimate and touching photographic project that recounts the passage of time in the family sphere. Among the Italian exhibitors is Pietro Terzini, an artist and designer capable of intertwining narrative, aesthetics, and reflections on customs, with a neon work created as part of the TramArt project with which the San Marzano winery explores and interprets the relationship between Art & Wine. Finally, a look at the new generations: in 2025, the collaboration with the Accademia di Brera also begins, with a virtual exhibition in Piazza Palmieri and the publication of a magazine edited by students, who narrate the theme of the festival through their visual creations, following a seminar with curator Arianna Rinaldo. Among the artists already announced: Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko, with his cult series City of Shadows, a ghostly and poetic tale of post-Soviet dissolution; conceptual artist Phillip Toledano, with his project We Are at War, a visual narrative constructed through the use of artificial intelligence; British artist Zed Nelson, with The Anthropocene Illusion, which explores the relationship between nature and artifice in the age of ecological emergency; Irish artist Rhiannon Adam, who recounts her shattered dream of taking part in a civilian voyage to the Moon in the series Rhi-Entry; and Italian artist Lorenzo Poli, with his post-anthropocene landscapes that intertwine sacred geography, spirituality, and the memory of the planet.<\/p>\n

In 2025, PhEST turns ten.<\/strong> A milestone that is not only symbolic, but profoundly concrete: ten years of research, languages, and relationships with the local area and the world. Celebrating it will be a major exhibition dedicated to the artist residencies that have marked the festival’s history. Italian and international photographers, young emerging artists, and recognized masters have traversed Monopoli and Puglia, leaving gazes, stories, and visual signatures imprinted in the collective memory. From the thousand-year-old olive trees of Alejandro Chaskielberg to the ports of Edoardo Delille, from the religious rites of Sanne De Wilde to the bodies of adolescents depicted by Mustafa Sabbagh, from the explorations of the landscape of Puglia’s excellence by Mattia Balsamini to the fishermen of Piero Martinello: each residency has shaped a unique, deep-rooted, and universal story. The works will be exhibited both indoors and outdoors, with a special focus on the Cala Porta Vecchia construction site. They will be accompanied by the publication of a catalog that brings together images, texts, behind-the-scenes footage, and testimonials, forming a veritable visual archive of the PhEST residencies. This precious object bears witness to a project that has transformed a festival into a living and generative artistic platform. Alongside the recollection of the past, PhEST continues to look forward, renewing its commitment to artistic production and local research. New artist residencies will be launched in 2025: photographer Arianna Arcara was the protagonist of a residency in Daunia, in the Foggia area, in June, opening a new front of visual investigation into inland and rural Puglia, as a counterpoint to the coastal landscape, intertwining the language of documentary with the community’s collective memory. The exhibition, thanks again this year to the support of the Southern Adriatic Sea System Authority, will be staged in the magical setting of Porto Vecchio. Visual artist Jos\u00e9 Angelino will bring his research into the states of matter to the site-specific installation Out of the Blue. Resistenze 2025 at the Stalle di Casa Santa, where he will recreate\u2014using glass and noble gases\u2014the Northern Lights in vitro, in a perceptive and poetic experience that challenges the laws of physics, curated by Melania Rossi. In Brighton, in collaboration with Photoworks UK and the Italian Cultural Institute in London, Piero Percoco explored life on the English coast with the gaze that has made him famous for his narratives of Southern Italy. The work, the result of his residency abroad, will be presented as a world premiere at PhEST. These residencies, along with the exhibitions produced and commissioned, confirm PhEST as a center for cultural production as well as exhibition, where the relationship with the territory remains central, alive, and transformative.<\/p>\n

The common thread guiding the artistic choices of director Gianni Troilo, photography curator Arianna Rinaldo, and contemporary art curator Roberto Lacarbonara is this year’s theme, which runs through the entire edition like an open question, a shared horizon: THIS IS US \u2013 A Capsule to Space. In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager probes into interstellar space carrying the Golden Record, a message intended for possible extraterrestrial life forms: sounds, images, and music to tell who we are. Almost fifty years later, PhEST builds its capsule\u2014made of photographs, installations, and contemporary languages\u2014and sends it into the symbolic space of the future, as a visual archive of humanity. “This tenth edition is an attempt to represent who we are today,” explains artistic director Gianni Troilo. “A visual message in a bottle that can travel across space and time, recounting identities, relationships, fears, desires, and dreams. A collective experiment, between memory and future, between science and imagination.” The theme unfolds in a program that unites photography, contemporary art, installations, and immersive experiences, in dialogue with the past and the challenges of our time. What would we like to leave of ourselves to the future? Which images deserve to survive our civilization?<\/p>\n

As per tradition, the opening days of PhEST\u2014scheduled for August 8\u201310, 2025\u2014will be a moment for the public and artists to meet, with special openings, artist-led tours, and performances. The highly anticipated portfolio reviews will also return, an opportunity for emerging and professional photographers to engage with international experts. There will also be visual talks organized in collaboration with Uniba – Aldo Moro University of Bari, a festival partner for four years now. The winners of the PhEST Pop-Up Open Call, organized in collaboration with LensCulture, PHmuseum, and with the support of Fujifilm Italia and San Marzano Vini, will be announced soon. Furthermore, we are pleased to reveal a preview: Fujifilm Italia has announced its award to Brigitta Tullo, an artist from Puglia who presented a project made entirely with instaxTM cameras at the PhEST Pop-Up Open Call. The work, entitled Shards of Time Echoes of Space, reflects on the spontaneity and instantaneity of contemporary images and will be included in the official exhibition circuit. Fujifilm Italia, as the main sponsor and consistently committed to providing concrete opportunities for emerging imaging talent and supporting photographic culture, will award the festival with one of its flagship X Series cameras, the X-T50 in a kit with the XC15-45.<\/p>\n

The tenth edition of PhEST begins a new chapter in its history with the opening of the Monastery of San Leonardo, which becomes the festival’s headquarters while awaiting the reopening of the historic spaces of Palazzo Palmieri. A symbolic place steeped in history and spirituality, the Monastery of San Leonardo, under the guidance of Cinzia Negherbon, PhEST’s organizational director and team coordinator, will finally be accessible again after years of closure and neglect. PhEST was responsible for reclaiming the spaces, securing the halls, and reactivating them culturally, through careful and respectful work with the architectural context. This is a concrete gesture of giving back to the city, renewing the festival’s profound connection with the region and its heritage. The opening of the Monastery represents not only a logistical and operational achievement, but also a political and symbolic gesture: inhabiting forgotten places, countering the homogenization of mass tourism, and promoting a culture of inclusivity and slow regeneration that values local rhythms and identities. The Monastery will also host some of this year’s key exhibitions, such as that of Martin Parr, as well as site-specific interventions and projects that engage with the complex’s historic architecture.<\/p>\n

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