Abracadabra 16-17-18 July 2026 Galatina, Puglia

For eight years, Domus Artist Residency has organized in Galatina a multidisciplinary summer festival supported by the Municipality, positioned at the intersection of contemporary art and the human sciences. The project is founded on a dual movement: a strong territorial rootedness and, simultaneously, a constant openness to international networks and perspectives, through the involvement of artists, researchers, and professionals from diverse European contexts.

The 2026 edition of the festival revolves around the project “Abracadabra”, conceived as a critical framework for examining the transformations of care in contemporary society. Rather than proposing a linear history of care, the project analyzes its progressive reconfiguration as an economic, media, and cultural language - a “marketing of care” regime that reframes care as a promise of well-being, performance, and self-optimization.

From this perspective, references to tarantism and the Land of Remorse - drawing on Ernesto De Martino’s research—are treated as a critical threshold rather than as mere historical or folkloric objects. Tarantism is interpreted as a means of processing psychic, social, and bodily discomfort, where body, crisis, and representation are articulated through specific cultural devices of care.

Building on this threshold, “Abracadabra” reinterprets Europe’s cultural and symbolic geographies as a field of asymmetric tensions, where care practices are distributed according to different regimes of visibility, control, and value production. In this framework, the North is observed as a space where the logics of formalization, institutionalization, and technologization of care are particularly advanced, while the South is understood as an archive of bodily practices, rituals, and crises that enable an oblique reading of contemporary transformations - without being reducible to them.

The project traces the transformations of care as a process of intensification spanning media, economies, and imaginaries: from the post-war advertising construction of well-being, to its expansion as a language of emancipation and bodily discipline, to the full mediatization of well-being through television and consumption.

Within this process, gender acts as a sensitive infrastructure of care practices - not as an isolated theme, but as a field through which historical exposures, prescriptions, and forms of bodily self-optimization are distributed. In parallel, the project incorporates an ecological dimension of care, extending it beyond the human body toward environments, resources, and life forms, increasingly integrated into logics of management and valorization.

In the present, these dynamics extend into the cultures of self-management, coaching, and the digital infrastructures of artificial intelligence, where care emerges as a diffuse technology for regulating subjectivity and experience.

“Abracadabra” reads these transformations in relation to the historical care practices of Southern Italy—not to establish linear continuities, but to place in tension different regimes of production of the body, value, and subjectivity.

More information about the programme and the guests coming soon …