NEXUS are connections, ties, relationships, and intersections between themes and disciplines, between sensory and cerebral experiences, between emotions and knowledge, between people, across time and space. NEXUS is a journey to the places where art and science collide, an exploration without a map, without a predetermined itinerary, guided by five key words: Nature, Environment, Xxi Century, hUmanity, Society. A skewed acrostic that inspired artists and scientists in their productions.
The panel discussion featuring the artists and curators of FESTAS 2026 – NEXUS will explore practices, languages, and visions, highlighting interdisciplinary approaches and new modes of cultural production. It's an opportunity to delve into the heart of the festival and discover the processes, ideas, and perspectives that animate FESTAS.
The proposed format brings together a transdisciplinary panel talk and a live concert as a single, continuous experience, where discourse and sound become two interconnected ways of navigating the same flooded terrain. Artists, scientists, and practitioners from different disciplines will open the evening with a conversation on floods as both physical and socio-political events, addressing themes such as climate disruption, water as a rights-bearing entity, more-than-human perspectives, and the role of embodied and sonic knowledge in understanding ecological crisis.
This conversation will flow directly into a live performance drawn from the various artists collective EP WITH/IN FLOODS artscience frameworks, with Sale (ATOMI) AND Lullaby for Floods (LETIZIA Artioli) where live data, weather scans, field recordings, and sonic compositions transform spoken reflections into an immersive sonic-liquid environment. The audience is thus invited to shift from intellectual listening to embodied experience: to sense how floods dissolve boundaries between geographies, species, and temporalities, and how sound can become a medium for inhabiting uncertainty, turbulence, and the future possibility of ecological regeneration.
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“Sale” _quadraphonic experience
(Lorenzo Setti aka ATŌMI)
Listening session inspired by the winter sounds of the Amalfi Coast, a critical reflection on the “tourist flood” that affects the area during the spring and summer months. This phenomenon alters not only the landscape, but also the society that inhabits it, leaving cultural and social desolation in its wake. This is why the artist compares it to the ebb and flow of the tide, which inspired him to choose the title 'Sale' (Italian word that has a double meaning: salt – to rise), later included in the Various Artists compilation 'Within Flood', released by ATME Records to raise awareness of flooding and increasingly frequent, devastating climate-related disasters in a broad and metaphorical sense.
Lullaby for Floods
(Letizia Artioli)
The live performance combines real-time weather data, satellite data, and field recordings from flooded areas to narrate the story of disruptive flood events, post-flood flows, and ongoing water currents. The work interrogates how we perceive bodies of water formed by floods and rain as they transform into rivers that reshape and reclaim the landscape, questioning the way we experience complexity and disruption. The concept is a live sonic composition and performative installation employing Playtron, Biotrons, and data streams collected from satellites, live weather scans, and field recordings gathered at flooded sites, all translated into sound to generate a continuously evolving sonic ecoSYSTEM.