MIPphest2026 10^ Festival Internazionale di fotografia e arti visive: ANTROPOGRAFIE MEDITERRANEE.Mappe dell’umano tra luoghi, memorie e appartenenze. | Matera City Pass
MIPphest2026 10^ Festival Internazionale di fotografia e arti visive: ANTROPOGRAFIE MEDITERRANEE.Mappe dell’umano tra luoghi, memorie e appartenenze.
Organized by MIP - Matera International Photography APS - ETS
The MIP – Matera International Photography APS–ETS opens on Thursday, June 25, 2026, at 6:30 pm, at the State Archives of Matera (Via T. Stigliani, 25). Mediterranean Anthropographies, a group exhibition curated by Maristella Trombetta, Professor of History of Aesthetics at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, opens on Thursday, June 25, 2026.
What is a horizon?
Not a line that delimits the visible, but a promise of meaning. Not a boundary, but a threshold. The horizon accompanies our every gaze without ever allowing itself to be reached; it recedes as we approach, continually opening us to new possibilities of experience.
It is from this intuition that "Mediterranean Anthropographies" was born, the group exhibition within the tenth edition of the MIPphest2026 Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, under the artistic direction of Antonello Di Gennaro.
To mark its tenth anniversary, the Festival, for its second year, entrusts fourteen internationally recognized artists—Melania Avanzato (France), Ruben Buhagiar (Malta), Carla Cantore (Italy), Michele Carmineo (Italy), Kevin Cascha (Malta), Antonello Di Gennaro (Italy), Enzo Ferrari (Italy), Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy (France), Christian Gold-Kurz (Austria), Maurizio Guarino (Italy), Marcela Grassi (Spain), Pygmalion Karatzas (Greece), Maria Pansini (Italy), and Simonetta Prestinenzi (Italy)—with a simple yet inexhaustible question: what does it mean to inhabit the Mediterranean today?
The works in the exhibition do not respond through descriptions of places or inventory of landscapes. Rather, they construct a phenomenology of the Mediterranean gaze, a visual itinerary in which the sea emerges as experience, memory, atmosphere, and existential condition.
The Mediterranean that flows through these images does not coincide with a geography. It is a lived space. A web of relationships sedimented over time. A mental and emotional place where belonging, migration, absences, encounters, and desires intertwine.
The photographs thus become sensitive maps. They do not indicate routes to follow, but experiences to travers.
Each artist composes their own Mediterranean through seemingly dispersed fragments: a light caressing a surface, the outline of a coast, a human presence dissolving into the landscape, a detail bearing the weight of memory. There is nothing monumental in these images. Rather, there is attention to what escapes, to what remains on the margins of the narrative, to that atmospheric dimension that precedes any definition and constitutes the invisible fabric of our relationship with the world.
As contemporary reflections on space and perception have shown, we do not simply inhabit places: we are inhabited by the atmospheres they generate. Landscapes are not neutral scenarios before our eyes, but fields of emotional resonance, embodied memories, experiences that shape our way of feeling and understanding.
From this perspective, the Mediterranean appears as a vast cultural atmosphere. A sea that does not separate but connects. A living archive of civilizations, languages, gestures, and imaginations. A shared horizon where differences and proximities constantly converge.
The title of the exhibition, like that of the Festival's theme, alludes precisely to this condition of openness. Horizons are fluid because our experience of the world is fluid. The identities that traverse the Mediterranean are fluid. The memories that migrate from one shore to the other are fluid, as are the narratives that transform, and the images that continue to generate new interpretations.
The works of the thirteen artists do not construct a unitary representation of the Mediterranean. On the contrary, they convey its plural, mobile, and irreducible nature. Together, they compose a constellation of perspectives that invites visitors to question their own relationship with the landscape, with memory, and with each other.
Ten years after its inception, MIPphest celebrates not just an anniversary, but a vision: that of photography capable of transcending the mere recording of reality to become a tool of knowledge, experience, and imagination.
"Mediterranean Anthropographies" is an invitation to pause on the threshold of the visible.
To recognize that every landscape holds a story yet to be told.
And that every horizon, before being a shape of the world, is a shape of our gaze.
The inauguration will be attended by Pietro Sannelli, Director of the State Archives, Carla Cantore, MIP President, Antonello Di Gennaro, Artistic Director, Maristella Trombetta, and the artists.
The initiative is made possible thanks to the support of the Basilicata Chamber of Commerce and the State Archives of Matera, and in collaboration with the Malta Photographic Society, MIPP Malta Institute of Professional Photography, and The Federation of European Photographers (FEP). It also enjoys the patronage of the Ministry of Culture, Directorate General of Archives, Superintendency of Archaeology and Bibliography of Basilicata, State Archives of Matera, the Municipality of Matera, and the Matera-Basilicata 2019 Foundation.
The exhibition is open to the public free of charge until July 31, 2026.
