{"id":8245,"date":"2026-10-02T07:26:39","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T05:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/?p=8245"},"modified":"2026-10-02T07:26:39","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T05:26:39","slug":"the-fight-of-khersons-mothers-rave-meets-fitness-and-dua-lipas-book-picks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/the-fight-of-khersons-mothers-rave-meets-fitness-and-dua-lipas-book-picks\/","title":{"rendered":"The fight of Kherson’s mothers, rave meets fitness, and Dua Lipa’s book picks"},"content":{"rendered":"

OCTOBER 16-27. MOTHERS OF KHERSON \/ WARSAW, POLAND<\/strong><\/p>\n

Giving voice to the grief of Ukrainian mothers
\n<\/strong><\/em>
\nBring Kids Back UA, the association launched by Volodymyr Zelensky to save Ukrainian children forcibly deported to Russia and to occupied territories, brought 103 children and teenagers home in August. Since 2022, more than 20,000 have been deported through deception (parents thought they were sending them to summer camp, or were told it would be safer), and exposed to Russian propaganda and military education, and to the erasure of their Ukrainian identity. So many families \u2014 many mothers and grandmothers \u2014 have undertaken journeys of thousands of kilometres through Poland, Belarus and Russia to occupied Crimea (from Kherson the direct route is only a hundred kilometres) to go and bring them back. The opera “The Mothers of Kherson,” co-produced by New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki, where it will premiere on October 16 (a concert version was performed in Kyiv in June), reworks and condenses the testimonies of deported children and their families into the journey of three women towards Crimea. The libretto is by George Brant, written in English to reach as wide an audience as possible; the conductor is Keri-Lynn Wilson, co-founder of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra; the documentary-style direction is by Barbara Wysocka; and the music, woven through with threads of southern Ukrainian folk music, is by Maxim Kolomiiets.<\/p>\n

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OCTOBER 1-11. ART EXPLORA FESTIVAL \/ LE HAVRE, FRANCE<\/strong><\/p>\n

The museum moored in Europe’s seas
\n<\/strong><\/em>
\nThe catamaran Artexplorer has arrived in Le Havre from Cascais, where it will be moored until October 11. It’s a museum-boat and a travelling cultural festival, supported by the EU in partnership with various institutions, which since 2024 has been sailing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic waters that lap Europe’s shores, bringing culture to every port. The vessel, designed by Axel de Beaufort and Guillaume Verdier and built by Perini Navi in La Spezia, is 47 metres long with a 55-metre mast, has agile ultralight aluminium hulls, and is the largest sailing catamaran ever launched. Its sails are a work by Laure Prouvost and read: “Ideally you would sea where to go \/ Here we dream of no more front tears,” playing on the pronunciation of “frontiers” (as the artist puts it: the fluidity of the sea doesn’t allow borders to be controlled). The project raises awareness of ocean-related themes, from biodiversity to migration. In Le Havre, the onboard exhibition space hosts “Song of Water,” in which the artworks are in dialogue with palaeontological specimens. The festival spills out onto the pier, with installations, experiences, performances and concerts, including Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s immersive exhibition on the ocean depths, the Ballet National de Marseille’s collective (LA)HORDE (dancing this weekend at Romaeuropa), choreographer Le\u00efla Ka (who choreographed Beyonc\u00e9’s latest tour), as well as talks with researchers, divers, artists and experts who look at the ocean from different perspectives. Artexplorer will then set sail for the Tunis Biennial, before finally docking in Saint-Malo.<\/p>\n

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OCTOBER 23-NOVEMBER 22. WALID RAAD, FESTIVAL OF (IN)GRATITUDE \/ PARIS, FRANCE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Art on the border between reality and fiction<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

A couple of weeks ago at the Cent Quatre cultural centre, in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, middle-aged musicians accompanied by a teenage singer took turns on stage, moving nimbly between klezmer, Italian music, French chanson, Cuban son and Arabic music, alongside a DJ \u2014 a formidable woman skilled at blending Arabic sounds with funk and the French touch. The hall became a kind of cheerful, colourful, multicultural dance floor where people of every age and background, all from the neighbourhood, had a great time. It’s in this space, open to encounter and to otherness, that an exhibition by Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad is also opening, featuring a selection of some of his more recent works, some from the Venice Biennale, tied to the last forty years of war in the Middle East \u2014 Raad began working during the years of Operation Peace for Galilee and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. He is an artist of hybrid forms, both because he works with photography, sculpture, collage, words, video and drawing, and because he blurs the line between history and fiction to probe the relationship between art and memory. He is an archivist, a forger, a storyteller, and will personally guide the public through the show, every day, on guided tours.<\/p>\n

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OCTOBER 21, 2026-APRIL 18, 2027. GENGHIS KHAN AND THE WORLD OF THE MONGOLS \/ BERLIN, GERMANY<\/strong><\/p>\n

The secret history of the world’s largest empire
\n<\/strong><\/em>
\nAs Kader Abdolah recounts in “What You Are Looking For Is Looking For You,” Rumi, the Sufi poet and mystic born in 1207 in what was then the Caliphate of Baghdad, today Afghanistan, spent nearly his whole life fleeing the Mongols along the Silk Road, through Central Asia, Baghdad, Aleppo, Mecca, and on into Turkey. The Mongols, led by Tem\u00fcjin and his heirs, conquered everything and built the largest contiguous empire in history, a sea of land whose outer edges were the capitals of subjugated civilisations. It stretched from Korea to China to Russia and Ukraine, with military victories in Poland and Hungary. The exchange of goods, cultures and peoples that flourished under the Pax Mongolica still shapes Eurasian demographics today. To dig deeper, there’s “The Secret History of the Mongols,” the first work of Mongolian literature, written anonymously around 1200. Or there’s the exhibition “Genghis Khan and the World of the Mongols” opening at Berlin’s James-Simon-Galerie, mounted to mark 800 years since Genghis Khan’s death and following twenty years of research between Germany and Mongolia. Through artefacts found in Mongolia and Europe, it traces the history of the Mongol Empire, from the steppe principalities to nomadic mobility, equestrian culture and the rise of great multi-ethnic cities, and its political, economic and cultural impact on Eurasia.<\/p>\n

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OCTOBER 8-11. FESTIVAL DELL’INNOVAZIONE E DELLA SCIENZA \/ SETTIMO TORINESE, ITALY<\/strong><\/p>\n

Driving change by trusting curiosity
\n<\/strong><\/em>
\nCuriosity recognises otherness and pushes us towards the unknown, and it’s sparked by the most unfathomable and bizarre reasons. The Festival dell’Innovazione e della Scienza in Settimo Torinese, through its programme, satisfies the widest and most varied curiosities \u2014 even those of people wondering: where does wastewater end up? This edition’s theme, Reactions, is an invitation to observe the links between the elements of a system and the role each of us can play in driving change. There will be talks devoted to the microorganisms that make up smartphones, to aerospace travel, to the role of robotics in care work, to digital activism under authoritarian regimes, to the immune system, to how frustration can escalate into violence, to plants’ capacity to adapt, and to what happens in the brain when we fall in love.<\/p>\n

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OCTOBER 24, 2026-FEBRUARY 21, 2027. ANNA CASPARSSON. THE ISLE OF BLISS \/ MALM\u00d6, SWEDEN<\/strong><\/p>\n

Precise stories told with needle and thread
\n<\/strong><\/em>
\nEmbroidery, crochet, collage, ceramics, cooking, and paperwork have historically often been dismissed as feminine disciplines, minor arts compared to the nobler painting, sculpture or architecture. In “Cucire Universi” (“Stitching Universes”), Domitilla Dardi overturns this perspective and tells the “counter-history” of art, reflecting on how these design cultures could today be a resource for uncovering methodologies and production and ecological processes applicable to medicine, construction and aerospace engineering. This is partly why so many women artists have been forgotten, and why there is now an effort to recover a submerged heritage \u2014 such as that of the Swedish artist Anna Casparsson (1861\u20131961), soon on show at the Moderna Museet Malm\u00f6. A sewing and embroidery artist, she composed sophisticated subjects with needle and thread \u2014 landscapes, scenes, stories, motifs \u2014 drawn from fairy tales, folk stories, epic cycles, literature, music, or her own experience, all rich in vividness, precision and narrative expressiveness. She was a pianist, and the drawing room of her Villa Sn\u00e4ckan was frequented by artists and intellectuals, yet her art remained private well into old age, and her first solo show opened only shortly before her hundredth birthday.<\/p>\n

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OCTOBER 21-25. ADE \/ AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS<\/strong><\/p>\n

The other (daytime) side of the world’s biggest dance event
\n<\/strong><\/em>
\nADE (Amsterdam Dance Event) is an enormous electronic music festival, not only for its lineup \u2014 which in this, its thirtieth birthday, involves more than 1,500 artists and 600,000 attendees \u2014 but also because it is one of the most important business platforms for the music industry. The daytime programme alternates networking between artists, their representatives and record labels with talks on all sorts of subjects, such as the discussion on sampling ethics, which brings together producers, cultural-rights activists and artists: if all art involves borrowing and remixing, electronic music is ontologically so, built from alterations and reworkings of extracted audio fragments. Drawing on \u2014 or stealing from \u2014 the sonic and musical traditions of under-resourced communities, without building a collaboration that benefits everyone involved, is increasingly criticised within the industry. For a deeper dive into ethical questions, another talk looks at the link between club culture, excess and substance use, and at how the relationship with drugs is being renegotiated today, with a sober culture spreading that speaks the language of wellness (rave running clubs \u2014 running behind a speaker \u2014 are becoming ever more popular). Besides exhibitions, installations and shows like “Swan Lake Remixed,” with the Dutch National Ballet and a hip-hop collective, there’s music everywhere, all night long.<\/p>\n

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OCTOBER 20-NOVEMBER 1. LONDON LITERATURE FESTIVAL \/ LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dua Lipa brings her book club to the Southbank
\n<\/strong><\/em>
\nPublishers play the acrobat, throwing themed parties with branded merchandise \u2014 all that’s missing are the balloons \u2014 but the only way to sell books and get people reading beyond the 25 readers who get them for free anyway is, as Guia Soncini has written, for some celebrity to switch on their phone camera and say: so-and-so’s book is great. If the celebrity in question is Dua Lipa (and lately Obama too), then you can hope to sell a few copies. As we all know, the pop star and arbiter of taste reads a book by a different author every month through her book club Service95, then interviews them (the book club is an extension of her content platform Service95, which publishes carousels of cultural recommendations and asks other celebrities questions like: which fictional universe would you want to live in? Actress Hannah Einbinder’s answer: “The Lord of the Rings” \u2014 she’d love to be an elf but knows she’d really be a hobbit). In July Dua Lipa interviewed Lea Ypi, in August Madeline Cash, in September Kaveh Akbar, and in October she’s the curator-in-residence for the new edition of the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival. She has curated a discussion with English PEN on threats to freedom of expression, one on the rhythm and sound of words, one on writing about masculinity, and will also be in conversation with two Smiths \u2014 first Patti, then Zadie.<\/p>\n

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OCTOBER 15-31. WEXFORD FESTIVAL OPERA \/ WEXFORD, IRELAND<\/strong><\/p>\n

A new songbook of broken hearts
\n<\/strong><\/em>
\nWexford is a small Irish port town whose main activities include mussel farming and one of the most important opera festivals in the world, which for 75 years has mostly staged minor, forgotten operas. In its early days, opera fever gripped the whole county, turning citizens of every class into opera buffs who took their holidays in October to help with the staging, and who played folk ballads in the pubs alongside arias by Italian sopranos. Over the years the festival has become increasingly exclusive and inaccessible to the community, so since 2023 a “Community Opera” has been introduced, actively involving local talent; this year it has been entrusted to the hard-of-hearing composer, writer and activist Ail\u00eds N\u00ed R\u00edain. Among the productions in the programme, overseen by artistic director Rosetta Cucchi, “The First Festival” will premiere, composed by Alberto Caruso with a libretto by writer Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn (a native of the county). The opera is set in October 1951, during the first edition of Wexford, and tells the story of four workers, freshly dumped and heartbroken, who meet four international opera singers arriving in town for the festival \u2014 themselves heartbroken too, and desperately in need of being loved. A big 1950s-themed party has also been organised for opening night. T\u00f3ib\u00edn will also present, in a world premiere alongside composer Conor Linehan, a songbook of fifteen songs in which the writer and the musician imagine the world 75 years from now.<\/p>\n

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OCTOBER 2-3. BIEN DANS MA T\u00caTE \/ MARSEILLE, FRANCE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mental health is a cultural matter<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Looking at Europe without looking at the richness of the Mediterranean basin is as short-sighted as looking at mental health without considering cultural and ethnographic diversity. “Bien dans ma t\u00eate,” the mental health festival run by the Mucem, the museum of the Mediterranean, explores the theme through the lens of interculturality, asking how we care for one another while taking origin, language, religion, culture and imagination into account. Of migratory journeys, of wars, of colonial systems and of racism. Besides debates and talks, visitors can take part in a guided-workshop visit, using Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, of the exhibition “M\u00e9diterran\u00e9es,” which displays art born out of colonial contexts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OCTOBER 16-27. MOTHERS OF KHERSON \/ WARSAW, POLAND Giving voice to the grief of Ukrainian mothers Bring Kids Back UA, the association launched by Volodymyr Zelensky to save Ukrainian children forcibly deported to Russia and to occupied territories, brought 103 children and teenagers home in August. Since 2022, more than 20,000 have been deported through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":8337,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8245","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\/8245","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=8245"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8340,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8245\/revisions\/8340"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}