{"id":5673,"date":"2025-10-03T00:02:20","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T22:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/?p=5673"},"modified":"2025-10-03T00:02:20","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T22:02:20","slug":"art-music-literature-the-city-and-a-strike-whats-on-in-europe-in-october","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/art-music-literature-the-city-and-a-strike-whats-on-in-europe-in-october\/","title":{"rendered":"Art, music, literature, the city and a strike. What\u2019s on in Europe, in October"},"content":{"rendered":"

SEPTEMBER 19-OCTOBER 19. WORLD PRESS PHOTO \/ GRONINGEN, THE NETHERLANDS<\/em><\/p>\n

What have we done? 70 years of the world in photographs<\/strong><\/p>\n

There’s always a World Press Photo exhibition somewhere around the world, but “What Have We Done? Unpacking Seven Decades of World Press Photo,” in Groningen, curated by photographer Cristina de Middel, does something different. For the association’s 70th anniversary, WPP questions the value of photojournalism today. If the world and our way of taking photos have changed, why do we tell stories in the same way? To answer this, WPP has opened its archive, which has given global resonance to nearly unknown stories as well as tools to interpret the world, and has called it into question: it has traced the stereotypes it helped perpetuate, the absent voices, and has built the exhibition around these critical issues. Visual patterns emerge in which men are always in action, decisive, authority figures, while women are vulnerable, in tears, objectified, decorative elements; white soldiers are human, fragile, while non-white ones are violent or in combat. Tragedies are spectacularized through beauty; suffering, even hunger, arouses morbid fascination. The intent is to look inward, according to director Joumana El Zein Khoury: “Acknowledging our past\u2014its strengths and its flaws\u2014is essential if we are to learn, evolve, and do better. By understanding where we\u2019ve been, we can more thoughtfully navigate where we\u2019re going.\u201d<\/p>\n

OCTOBER 17-19. UTOPIAN HOURS \/ TURIN, ITALY<\/em><\/p>\n

Trying to “make the city”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Utopian Hours, Turin’s international festival dedicated to “city making,” returns to its original format: looking at city making in a kaleidoscopic and multifaceted way, from the perspective of architects, urban planners, visionaries but also social innovators, activists, entrepreneurs. “Cities belong to everyone, anyone can contribute to building a piece that in turn changes its image,” Luca Ballarini, founder and creative director, tells Foglio Europeo. At the center, the question: how to collectively design pieces of the city that contribute to modifying its lived experience and perception? The answer is a polyphonic program built “like a lineup”: alongside world stars, emerging and experimental realities find space, with a perspective that goes beyond the Eurocentric vision. The edition’s name, United Cities, expresses the need to build shared strategies and best practices, with the ambition of creating a “universal consciousness on city making, also thanks to tools like AI, a global competence we can all draw upon and that can provide solutions.” The organizations that will animate the conferences and round tables share a holistic vision of the urban environment and attention to social impact. Among the examples: London National Park City, which invites us to see the metropolis as a national park; Almere, in the Netherlands, a community that has built a sustainable village in open source (WikiHouse); and Oodi Helsinki Central Library, the most beautiful library in the world.<\/p>\n

SEPTEMBER 9 – OCTOBER 25. LA CHAIR EST TRISTE H\u00c9LAS \/ PARIS, FRANCE<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet another French strike \u2014 about sex<\/strong><\/p>\n

“One day I stopped having sex with men” is a line from “La chair est triste h\u00e9las” (The flesh is sad alas, 2023), by writer and author Ovidie, a small cult book in France, now turned into a monologue adapted for theater by Ovidie herself and performed by Anna Mouglalis. The show, staged at the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre de l’Atelier in Paris, preserves the intimate essentiality of the text and the power with which many women have identified: Mouglalis, alone on stage, announces with her hoarse and metallic voice that she will no longer have sex with men. And she proceeds with tight, humor-filled prose to list the reasons for this strike \u2013 la gr\u00e8ve is daily bread for the French \u2013 of “simulation,” because heterosexual sex had become for her only an experience of suffering and disappointment. It’s an explosive monologue that concretely addresses sexuality, desire and the taboo that being desirable is essential to a woman’s worth. The audience participates emotionally and establishes a suspended bond with the actress, who claims the register of mockery, reclaiming it. It’s the feminist and joyful liberation of the “mal bais\u00e9es,” the frustrated ones.<\/p>\n

OCTOBER 7-12. UNSOUND: WEB FESTIVAL \/ KRAKOW, POLAND<\/em><\/p>\n

Dancing at dawn beneath a whale floating overhead<\/strong><\/p>\n

Europe is one of the liveliest laboratories for electronic music and supports the TIMES platform (The Independent Movement for Electronic Scenes), created in collaboration with music festivals including Unsound in Krakow, the most radical and experimental. A Polish event with various spin-offs around the world \u2013 this year in Osaka and New York \u2013 it defines itself as a platform for “amorphous” music. Indeed, it’s a free space for collaborations, contaminations and aggregations between different disciplines and cultures. And it’s an avant-garde festival because its lineups intercept and anticipate trends and directions in contemporary music. You go to Unsound to surrender, and be open to encountering projects, sounds and aesthetics from all over the world and from all worlds. The agenda, from Tuesday to Sunday, marks every hour of day and night with a packed program not only of concerts and sets, but also debates, workshops, screenings with artists and intellectuals. Events are spread throughout the city, but this year’s most evocative locations are two communist-era buildings: the Jubilat, the penthouse of a former department store overlooking the medieval castles of the center, where opening and closing parties will take place, and the Hotel Forum, a suspended concrete sperm whale, where most of the evening events will occur, including Sunday’s dawn set.<\/p>\n

OCTOBER 17, 2025 – APRIL 5, 2026. MIGRATIONS ET CLIMAT: COMMENT HABITER NOTRE MONDE? \/ PARIS, FRANCE<\/em><\/p>\n

History of climate migrations<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the gates of the Bois des Vincennes stands the Palais de la Porte Dor\u00e9e, home to the National Museum of Immigration History and the Tropical Aquarium. In addition to the permanent collection and numerous activities, a temporary exhibition dedicated to the relationship between human migration and climate is opening. Climate migrations have always been part of human history, as has humanity’s timely and imaginative capacity for adaptation. The exhibition includes documentary photographs, videos, infographics, installations, and has been set up with great scientific rigor, thanks to data and interpretations provided by scientific institutions and experts. The itinerary recounts climate migrations, adaptation strategies, institutional responses \u2013 legal and humanitarian \u2013 and case studies to address biodiversity challenges.<\/p>\n

OCTOBER 16-19. SIGNAL FESTIVAL \/ PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC<\/em><\/p>\n

At the intersection of algorithm and heart<\/strong><\/p>\n

For the organizers of Signal, Prague’s festival of contemporary and digital cultures, the answer to personal and global crisis depends greatly on our openness to perceive life as an organism in which paradoxes coexist. The curators of the 2025 edition, Pavel Mrkus & Martin Po\u0161ta, have called the event “Solutions” and sought artists who explore the intersection between technology and emotion. Fifteen installations of contemporary and digital art compose two curatorial paths spread throughout the city, in which interactive environments and performances undertake a dialogue with urban space. The installations are mainly luminous, kinetic, a synthesis of mathematical precision with intuition, of algorithm with heart. They create relationships, for example with the city’s riverscape. The festival also opens spaces in Prague normally closed to the public, such as the Convent of St. Agnes with the installation “Tristan’s Ascension” by video art pioneer Bill Viola. The work investigates the evolution of consciousness and the contemplation of light as the primary element of life and, by recreating a meditative environment with technology, evokes the spiritual roots of European civilization.<\/p>\n

OCTOBER 2 – DECEMBER 8. LISBON ARCHITECTURE TRIENNALE \/ LISBON, PORTUGAL<\/em><\/p>\n

How heavy is the dust?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The technosphere is the ensemble of structures, infrastructures, tools and artifacts built by humans, from data centers to teaspoons, has a mass of 30 trillion tons, and is growing. Debris is everywhere: in the air, in water, underground and in orbit. To survive we must learn, as a species, to become lighter. But how? And today, how heavy is a city? This is the question from which the latest edition of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale moves, calling intellectuals, artists and experts in the fields of science, architecture, design, anthropology, urban planning and philosophy to open a public debate. The object of investigation is the spatial dimension in the transforming Anthropocene, the engine is architecture, the approach is multidisciplinary. Three lines of research \u2013 Fluxes, Spectres and Lighter \u2013 expressed in exhibitions, texts and programs, in which every work, installation, performance seeks to answer a question: how much does dust weigh? How to design with entropy? How to think together with others? Who holds the information? How much do migratory flows weigh? And data? What is a natural landscape? The exhibitions are accompanied by a weekend of meetings and lectures on the role of weight and gravity in infrastructures, space, environment and relationships.<\/p>\n

OCTOBER 21 – NOVEMBER 2. LONDON LITERATURE FESTIVAL \/ LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM<\/em><\/p>\n

The literary festival on the Thames<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Southbank Centre, a multifunctional arts center, has served as a model for many European institutions. Born in the postwar period to heal the community through a lively and accessible offering of art, ideas and culture, it was a “tonic” for the country, said Ted Hodgkinson, director of the Literature & Spoken Word program. Today, over half of the cultural offering is free and one of the most important events is the London Literature Festival, “a celebration of the written and spoken word.” The 2025 guest curator is singer-songwriter Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self Esteem, who composes a program sensitive to contemporaneity with much poetry and fluidity of literary genres (the artist explains it thus: “I want it all because I am greedy, and
\nI\u2019m no longer going to apologise for that.”). Among the most interesting panels, Kamala Harris with her memoir and electoral campaign; Reese Witherspoon, whose book club is one of the most influential in the publishing market, will present her new collaboration with Harlan Coben; Pankaj Mishra and Nesrine Malik will talk about Equator, a magazine that wants to tell the richness of the world excluded from Western narratives; Isabella Hammad and Mirza Waheed will discuss colonialism in Palestine and Kashmir. There will also be London’s high priestess, Zadie Smith, with her new collection of essays.<\/p>\n

JUNE 23 – OCTOBER 26. CINDY SHERMAN – THE WOMEN \/ MENORCA, SPAIN<\/em><\/p>\n

Even aging can be an art<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Judith Butler wrote that gender and identity are an act in becoming, something that “is done,” ultimately a performance, Cindy Sherman had been playing with and staging female identity for twenty years to question its role and stereotypes. The photographer, still on display at the Hauser & Wirth Menorca gallery, has since the 1970s created self-portraits in which she invents characters that explore femininity, gender, power. “Cindy Sherman. The Women” (the title comes from Clare Boothe Luce’s play), offers a selection of all the personas Sherman has brought to life. From the “Untitled Film Stills” in which she invents familiar protagonists of films that don’t exist, to question mass media society and the star system, to the most recent series in which she provocatively addresses another taboo of femininity: aging. She does everything herself: invents the persona, gets to know them, finds the costume, does her makeup, poses on set and photographs herself. Sherman has mixed and condensed in herself the role of photographer, narrator and model, highlighting the complexity of identity and thus reclaiming society’s gaze, primarily male. She is both subject and object of the work. Her work is fun, ironic, light and therefore so effective. The latest project is for the magazine that symbolizes intelligent lightness, the New Yorker. On the September 8 cover she creates her version of the dandy Eustace Tilley, protagonist of the first issue in 1925: “Being Eustace,” a performance cover.<\/p>\n

OCTOBER 8, 2025 – JANUARY 11, 2026. JON RAFMAN: 9 EYES\/COPENHAGEN, DENMARK<\/em><\/p>\n

So many odd things show up on Google Maps<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2007 Google sent an army of cars equipped with 9 cameras, GPS and laser scanners into the world to photograph every alley. The cars still continue their task today. Artist Jon Rafman has since 2008 traveled the world far and wide from his desk to collect a digital archive of screenshots of bizarre and amusing situations that accidentally ended up on Google Street View. “The 9 Eyes of Google Street View,” which investigates the everyday and existential aspects of life in the age of digital surveillance, is exhibited in a solo and comprehensive show at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, with Rafman’s own participation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SEPTEMBER 19-OCTOBER 19. WORLD PRESS PHOTO \/ GRONINGEN, THE NETHERLANDS What have we done? 70 years of the world in photographs There’s always a World Press Photo exhibition somewhere around the world, but “What Have We Done? Unpacking Seven Decades of World Press Photo,” in Groningen, curated by photographer Cristina de Middel, does something different. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5806,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":30,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5673"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5809,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5673\/revisions\/5809"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}