Break-in. SITU Festival is a territorial enhancement project focused on small villages, born from the desire to break away from the dominant art centers and the contemporary city model. It proposes a reinterpretation of exhibition spaces, searching for unusual and alternative ways to experience and understand art beyond the prevailing system. Founded by artist Nicola Tineo and organized by the Zona Blu A.P.S. association, the first editions took place in Militello Val di Catania (CT), followed by Acate (RG), Chiaramonte Gulfi (RG), Modica (RG), and most recently, the sixth edition in Ficarra (ME). The name SITU encapsulates the festival’s essence: situ means "place" in both Latin and Sicilian. The project is conceived, developed, and realized in direct relationship with the space and environment that host it. SITU unfolds through historic sites, creating a widespread exhibition route that highlights the value of Sicily’s inland villages. It explores and shares inclusive and community-based cultural practices, engaging both residents and visitors through a rediscovery of everyday places, as seen through the eyes of contemporary international artists. Each year, SITU builds a temporary and diffuse cultural apparatus, generating a network of relationships between artists, landscapes, communities, and memory. Every edition reactivates abandoned or underused spaces, connecting them with contemporary artistic practices and generating new narratives capable of restoring meaning and value to the involved territories. The core aim of SITU is to initiate territorial regeneration through artistic and cultural experience.

The sixth edition of SITU Festival took place in Ficarra (ME), a hillside village in the Nebrodi region, from August 29 to 31, 2025, following an intensive and immersive artist residency from August 18 to 28. Nine emerging artists were selected through an open call and invited to live and work within the village: Lorenzo Finotti (Verona, 2000), Vittoria Montesano (Erba, 2002), Rosa Frazzica (Lucca, 1999), Gregorio Vignola (Como, 1995), Camila Curiel (Caracas, 1994), Alessia Talò (Italy, 1999), Margot Kalach (Mexico City, 1992), Silvia Muscolino (Catania, 1998), and Rossana La Verde (Caltanissetta, 1997).
Curated by festival founder Nicola Tineo, the residency encouraged deep engagement with the village's network of museums and collections, connecting the artists with the historical and cultural identity of Ficarra. This edition was made possible through the collaboration with La Stanza della Seta, a cultural project founded in 1989 by artist Mauro Cappotto, which fosters artist residencies and dialogue between contemporary art, memory, and the local territory.
Based in the 19th-century Palazzo Milio, La Stanza della Seta opened its spaces and dispersed showcases throughout the village, providing fertile ground for exchange between artists and the local community. Public and private spaces – ancient homes, museum halls, piazzas, and domestic environments – were transformed into temporary studios, observation points, and artistic laboratories where art intertwined with memory, daily gestures, architecture, and landscape.
The resulting works – installations, performances, and sculptures – emerged from a situated and sensitive gaze, and were presented to the public during the festival as site-specific interventions, forming deep connections between contemporary artistic language and the historical, social, and symbolic fabric of the village.
A particularly meaningful collaboration was with Lenzo Winery, a local wine producer that fully embraced SITU Festival’s mission. The winery commissioned a site-specific work by artists Lorenzo Finotti and Vittoria Montesano, who collaborated as a duo during the residency. The resulting installation, conceived in Ficarra, was later permanently installed within the winery’s premises – located in the hills of the Nebrodi and not yet open to the public. The Lenzo family, long committed to high-quality winemaking, chose to directly support the project, recognizing contemporary art as a cultural, economic, and relational investment in the territory. This stands as a virtuous example of pure patronage, demonstrating how local enterprises can actively promote artistic research and help build new, future-oriented cultural infrastructures rooted in the region.
On August 23, with the support and invitation of partner Fondazione OELLE, artist Luca Vitone presented his project Pro tempore (winner of the 2025 Italian Council) in Ficarra, screening his film Romanistan (2019). The event opened a space for dialogue and debate around Vitone’s artistic practice and the film’s central themes, particularly cultural memory and collective identity. The following day, Vitone and gallerist Gianluca Collica participated in a wide-ranging studio visit across Ficarra, exploring the spaces where the resident artists were working. Another key moment was the visit by Paolo Brodbeck, who not only attended the festival but actively engaged with the artists and their works, contributing to an intergenerational and enriching exchange within the residency process. Likewise, the visit to the studio of Alessio Barchitta, founder of the Collettivo Flock in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (ME), and the Discontinuo residency project, fostered meaningful connections between the artists and other active initiatives in the region.

The exhibition route spanned the entire historic center of Ficarra, including:
Palazzo Milio Museum, Palazzo Ferraloro, Palazzo Busacca, the Convent of the Hundred Arches, the Oil Museum, the Prison Fortress, four exhibition vitrines, as well as private courtyards, homes, and public urban spaces.
In addition to the residents' works, the festival featured pieces by guest artists Diego Miguel Mirabella, Alfredo Pirri, Luca Vitone, Massimo Bartolini, Nicola Tineo, Dumitrita Razlog, and TRDE. Site-specific contributions came from various artists and collectives including the trio Sam Zanardo, Sara Firrarello, and Vittorio Auteri, who presented a performative reimagining of the village at the Convent of the Hundred Arches.
Mac Tire, with his self-invented musical instrument Cariddi, brought the sound of the sea to the landlocked village. Oleksandr Stoliarov recorded ambient sounds throughout the residency and reinterpreted them in a sonic experiment, reflecting the aural essence of the place.
Evenings were animated by TRDE and DJs/producers Sumbakkos and Ice Granita.
The festival concluded on Sunday with a food performance by the duo Aterraterra – Fabio Aranzulla and Luca Cinquemani – whose research spans art, agriculture, and science. Their projects explore multispecies relationships, agricultural genetics, post-agricultural perspectives, and the cultural limits of edibility, reflecting on the complex legacies of plants and the implications of the climate crisis.
Through careful engagement with the Ficarra landscape, Aterraterra created two performative spaces where guests could literally taste the place. In a multisensory, interspecies experience, the audience was invited to chew, digest, and connect with the land – challenging their relationship with food and environment. The performance provoked deep reflection:
How do we relate to nature today? How do we recognize plants as active agents, rather than passive scenery? A powerful and poetic invitation to reconsider how we inhabit the world – beginning with what we place in our mouths.

Over the three-day festival, Palazzo Milio hosted a series of public talks under the theme “Starting from the Margins”, moderated by Viola Lo Monaco and Francesca De Chiara. The discussions involved artists, curators, foundations, independent spaces, and researchers, focusing on art as a practice of relationship, care, and rootedness in non-metropolitan areas. Marginal territories were not seen as voids to be filled, but as rich environments of memory, potential, and experimentation. Participants included: Mario Bronzino, Gianluca Collica (Fondazione Brodbeck), Vittorio Piraneo (Fondazione OELLE), Giorgio Mega (Studio Rizoma), Église, Pulcherrima Res, Fondazione RIV, and representatives from independent spaces such as La Siringe and SITU Festival itself. Artistic contributions came from Diego Miguel Mirabella and Aterraterra.

Over the three-day festival, Palazzo Milio hosted a series of public talks under the theme “Starting from the Margins”, moderated by Viola Lo Monaco and Francesca De Chiara. The discussions involved artists, curators, foundations, independent spaces, and researchers, focusing on art as a practice of relationship, care, and rootedness in non-metropolitan areas. Marginal territories were not seen as voids to be filled, but as rich environments of memory, potential, and experimentation.
Participants included: Mario Bronzino, Gianluca Collica (Fondazione Brodbeck), Vittorio Piraneo (Fondazione OELLE), Giorgio Mega (Studio Rizoma), Église, Pulcherrima Res, Fondazione RIV, and representatives from independent spaces such as La Siringe and SITU Festival itself. Artistic contributions came from Diego Miguel Mirabella and Aterraterra.
On the third day, a talk by collector Paolo Brodbeck and curator/professor Daniela Bigi enriched the dialogue with reflections on collecting and art education within the contemporary art system.
The Societas project – dedicated to building networks between foundations in Palermo and Catania – was presented as a model for activating cultural alliances between public bodies, independent spaces, and businesses.
Key themes emerged: the sustainability of artistic practices, support beyond funding, the need for alternative infrastructures, and the vision for a more ethical, participatory, and inclusive art system.
Ficarra – through its longstanding residency program initiated by Mauro Cappotto in 1989 and now in synergy with SITU – proved once again to be a living observatory: a place capable of fostering belonging, dialogue, and community participation. The strong turnout and high-quality contributions reflected a collective desire to build a new cultural ecology across the territory.

The sixth edition of SITU Festival was organized with the patronage and support of the Municipality of Ficarra, the Region of Sicily, and the Union of Municipalities “Terra dei Lancia”, in collaboration with:
La Stanza della Seta, Fondazione OELLE Mediterraneo Antico ETS, Fondazione Brodbeck, Fondazione RIV, and Pulcherrima Res.

Official sponsors: Pistì, Lenzo Winery, Plastitalia, Dueerre Printing, QUATER.
Once again, SITU Festival engaged interns from the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, offering hands-on learning experiences in direct contact with artists, curators, and cultural workers.
SITU affirms itself as a platform for shared growth and decentralized cultural production, capable of fostering synergies, building community, and breathing new life and meaning into places through contemporary art.
For ten days, SITU Festival 2025 transformed the village of Ficarra into an open laboratory, a site of listening and making, a relational platform connecting artists, institutions, local communities, and audiences. At a time when cultural work in marginal areas is an act of resilience, SITU continues to forge alliances, imagine new languages, and explore another way of thinking and living contemporary art – not as an event, but as a daily practice.