Breathe Days

The reflection on the Anthropocene crisis and the need for artists to weave multi-species alliances found a happy outcome in the municipality of Fluminimaggiore (South Sardinia) with the Giornate del Respiro, a festival of performing arts and the environment. In 2023 Sardegna Teatro proposes a new edition of the festival in which the community is at the centre of a process of dialogue with the artists in the area, assisting in site-specific projects, reasoning with the tools of art on new ecologies and strategies to "survive in an infected world "[Donna Haraway, 2019].

Giornate del Respiro intends to restore contact between art and nature and its living beings, besides an interaction between arts and no related sectors to create meeting opportunities.

The second edition also insists on the two axes of internationalization and training addressed to professionals and students by offering a programme that combines artistic performances and natural activities together with a deep reflection on nature, the environment and new ecologies.

Focusing on the breath – both a geographical and historical theme - a crucial node for the territory as well as for the contemporary world, the festival aims to radicalize the approach to new ecologies, tackling together new strategies for inhabiting the territories through community artistic processes.

One of the objectives of locating a festival in a small ex-mining village is to shift attention to the margins, finding new contexts that open to the experimentation of new models of sociality and artistic creation. The concepts of active citizenship and urban regeneration emerge and are designed from a perspective other than planning in urban centres. As a legacy of the previous edition, Sardegna Teatro has renovated the former cultural centre transforming it into a hundred-seat theatre now named Teatro del Respiro, where in autumn the organization hosts performances of artists who had already inhabited the area.
Most of the performances are the result of a synergic work between artists in residency and the local community, through the reconnection between art and living beings the people are given back new narratives of their own lives and past and the artist's work is nurtured by fascinating stories and experiences.

In this edition, a Summer school will focus on the issues of Environmental Humanities and will be held by the professors of the University of Rome 3 and the performative landscape artist Leonardo Delogu. Since the territories are also inhabited by an environmental community of living beings of many different species, Sardegna Teatro invests in environmental humanities as a useful theoretical tool to complement the performing arts. Thanks to the support of the Universities of Rome, Sassari and Cagliari, Sardegna Teatro fosters necessary training for cultural operators aware of environmental issues. On a national level, the collaborations with the Italian Consortium of INSITU, with the Master in Civic Arts in Rome, with DeriveApprodi, and the Spazio Kor in Asti, prove to be fundamental.

The international network INSITU provides tools and artists to activate creative processes and has been given a prominent position in the artistic programming of the festival. The festival acts on multiple levels of collaboration. Sardegna Teatro renews the involvement of local associations and other realities of the island. All the local associations propose activities that are comprised in the programme of the festival, while partners based all over the island contribute to the reflection on the main themes that cross Giornate del Respiro and support the storytelling of both the entire festival and single events.