between land and sea 2025

For the first time, Fondazione Studio Rizoma launches an open call for proposals from local partners in the city of Palermo and international collaborators from across the Mediterranean to actively contribute to the next edition of BETWEEN LAND AND SEA 2025. Scheduled to take place in Palermo in November 2025, the Festival aims to open a public space of learning, caring, experience, curiosity, inquiry, debate, delight, outrage, speculation, transgression, imagination and action about the meanings and possibilities contained in our lives and practices.

The topic we want to explore is SIGNIFICATO, as it seems that there is a historical need to defend the meaning of words and concepts almost etymologically. As political contexts are as polarised as ever, what are the meanings and signifiers we can identify for anchorage and guidance? Looking at BETWEEN LAND AND SEA, sea (mare) has two possible roots one coming from the Sanskrit mors, death for the perceived absence of life in the waters, and a second one coming from Greek and Latin and meaning sparkling or shining. Land (terra) has an Indo-European root with the same meaning as the Latin one translating to dry matter. Focusing on the intermediate space between land and sea may mean to focus on the relationship the two share with each other.

The term in between is written about by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. For them in between (entre in French) – “it is not an average at all; on the contrary, it is the point at which things accelerate. The ‘between’ is a transversal movement that flows in both directions, a flow without beginning or end that erodes its banks and gains speed in the middle.” The concept of between is used by them to describe the reality of relationships and interconnections, never fixed or determined, which are formed through complex dynamics that always take place in an interstitial space. Still in the discourse on territorialization and deterritorialization – in between can be seen as a place of interaction between opposing or different forces (land and sea) that mutually influence each other, and often give rise to new territories or possibilities of expression.

As stated in her text Nomadi, Rosie Braidotti challenges the idea that meaning can be found in a singular, static form or in one’s place of origin. Instead, meaning is not something inherent or static; it is something that is continuously constructed through encounters, transitions, and shifting identities. In line with Myriam Bahaffou’s dynamic approach to language, we propose a collective reflection about how meaning is constructed and renegotiated in relation to the normalization of dominant discourses and power structures.