On May 23, 2026, the town of Pollica (SA) will host “È ‘na fera” (It’s a Fair), the symbolic and relational centerpiece of the broader transdisciplinary project “Un mondo è possibile” — a set of artistic practices aimed at inhabiting the future before it disappears.
Involving approximately 70 artists including students, professors, and doctoral candidates from the New Technologies of Art program at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples, alongside the Department of Biology, Materials Engineering, and the Department of Agriculture at the University of Naples Federico II, the event transforms the entire town of Pollica into an open space for encounter, observation, and collective participation. The artists have been hosted in residence at the Castello dei Principi Capano, in collaboration with the Municipality of Pollica and the Future Food Institute.
Local associations, artists, residents, and community stakeholders will contribute to building a shared experience that connects Pollica with Piazza Garibaldi in Naples — through images, sounds, installations, convivial practices, and moments of exchange. A group of merchants, artisans, and families from Naples’ Vasto neighborhood will join the community of Pollica in this shared participation.
“In popular tradition, the ‘fera’ (fair) is a place of mixing, exchange, and encounter,” the organizers explain. “È ‘na fera” was conceived as an act of collective care and mutual openness — a temporary space to pause beside one another, even those most distant from oneself, creating an opportunity to practice sensitivity, listening, and closeness. The event seeks to transform public space into a human and relational device: a suspended time in which differences are not reduced but traversed together, imagining a temporary community founded on proximity, sharing, and the possibility of building new forms of coexistence.
Since February, artist residencies and a constant presence on the ground have allowed organizers to weave bonds with the Pollica community. Together, they have created “L’Atlante Fenotipico di Comunità” (The Community Phenotypic Atlas), an artistic and narrative device composed of over 120 portraits that collects faces, stories, memories, and identities of the Pollica area. The Atlas is not a simple documentary archive but a human and relational map of the community. Through portraits and testimonies, inhabitants become part of a collective narrative in which each face represents not just an individual, but a threshold through which to read belonging, social transformations, and shared memories. The portraits return the presence of individuals; the identities reveal their deeper stories. What emerges is an emotional geography of the territory — a constellation of relationships capable of observing the particular without losing sight of the whole.
The installation will be on display from May 20, 2026 at the Castello dei Principi Capano.
Converging into this path is also the Food System Dialogue, organized by the Future Food Institute Foundation as part of the European SWITCH project, titled “The Role of Art in Strengthening Scientific Dissemination and Citizen Engagement for Sustainable Food Systems.” This dialogue focuses on the role of artistic practices in scientific dissemination and building new forms of civic participation linked to sustainable food systems.
Running concurrently with the event program, from May 22 to 24, the Paideia Campus of the Future Food Institute will host RegenerAction 2026, the international retreat now in its fifth edition. Thirty international participants — including artists, economists, social innovators, designers, entrepreneurs, researchers, and changemakers — will arrive in Cilento to engage on themes of regenerative leadership and systemic change, taking part in the program’s central moments and contributing to the international dialogue promoted by the territory. Within this framework of citizen science and citizen art, the Pollica community is involved in experimentation to assess the impact of artistic practices on citizen engagement in vector control.
The project will continue on June 13, 2026 at Piazza Garibaldi, Naples, with “UAH — Oasi” (UAH — Oasis), a further public moment of restitution that will bring the construction of an urban oasis into the heart of the city, carrying forward the practices, relationships, and visions developed during the research journey between Pollica and Naples.
Photo credits: Carmen Vicinanza
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