Kain

Κάϊν

III edition of the Festival of Nomadic Art
Cain or the genesis of "space"

DESERTS/NOMADS/RENAISSANCES

The festival was born in 2021 as a symbolic re-familiarisation of the spaces of the town of Ferentino, which had been affected by abandonment and a more general crisis of places as spaces of encounter and memory. Within the festival, Ferentino is a metonymy of the wider Valle del Sacco, whose river is the third most polluted in Europe.

The word "nomad" comes from a reflection on the concept of the desert present in "A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze & Guattari: the nomad is not so much about moving, but about inhabiting the desert, a place that sacrifices the lives of inhabitants, ecosystems, and imaginaries for speculative, hygienic, and economic reasons.

The festival is an exercise in awakening the latent and dormant imaginative power of places. Each new participant is a nomadic visitor, an heir of Cain, who conditions the previously established spatial configuration. Exercise of systemic and complex inhabiting: the guest nomadises the host and vice versa.

PROGRAMME 2023: THE HEIRS OF CAIN

The 2023 programme envisages a mythopoetic journey in nomadism: After the murder, Cain is sentenced to exile, thus inaugurating the theme of the 2023 festival: SPACE.
The stories and the audience/people follow, rather than Cain himself, the history of his heirs, the history of which they themselves are the children.

The programme is articulated as follows:

1) Transhumance: an itinerant theatrical rite corresponding to Cain's movement; a theatrical rite on the move, a journey that traverses the historical memory of the town, following the mythology of the echo in a stratified story of multiple writings, multiple directions, and multiple works of art.

2) Arche: organic and site-specific exhibitions, following the cainitic exodus legacy, taking care of the ruined spaces that represent the ecological judgment of the earth.

3) The Sands of Urns: the bonfire.

4) Sound Roots II EDITION: sound roots are musical insemination projects, representing the phase in which Cain's heirs, after the bonfire, rise and go into the woods, beginning the domestication of spaces through sounds and voices.

5) Dungeons: role-playing and tabletop games (Dungeons & Dragons); dungeons are the unfortunate encounters on the island, but also adventurous ones.

6) Phantasms: a festival of short films and photography, phantasms are the visual wonders that Cain's heirs recreate within the caves.