WATER ISLANDS
Isole d’acqua
6th Annual Installation Art Festival ·
31․10-12․12․2026
Water Islands is the project at the heart of the 6th Annual Installation Art Festival of NPAK, developed in collaboration with Opificio Puca, Centre for Contemporary Art. The project brings two distant territories into relation, Castel Volturno, in Campania, and Yerevan, in Armenia, through a common and fragile substance: water.
When water crosses a territory, what does it carry with it? Sediments, waste, life, memory, conflicts and stories. Taken as a pretext, water becomes a witness to the transformations of the territories and communities it passes through. It is a resource, a memory, an identity and a space of conflict: it crosses borders, yet it is controlled, managed and contested. The project grows out of this tension between freedom of movement and appropriation, and reads it through three conditions:
– Water that flows, the Hrazdan river: movement, exchange, memory in transit.
– Water that stays, the artificial Yerevan Lake: a mirror of an environment marked by human intervention and climate change.
– Water that returns, a presence in urban space that brings memory, ritual and relation back to the centre of the city’s daily life.
The festival is conceived as a process even before it is an exhibition. The artists of Opificio Puca work in dialogue with the artists selected through NPAK’s open call: the exhibition space becomes an open studio, a multidisciplinary laboratory where practices born along the Volturno river meet the artistic context of Yerevan. Meetings, workshops and moments of shared work open the process to the public. What remains on display is the outcome of these encounters: the works arise from the exchange between the artists, from shared research and from the dialogue built day by day in Yerevan.
The aim is to build, across borders and distances, a poetic geography of water, spanning public and participatory art, performance, sound, video and installation. A practice that makes water not only an environmental question but also a political, social and cultural one: a device through which art makes crises, memories and inequalities visible, and creates occasions for listening and exchange between distant communities.
Opificio Puca is an artistic ecosystem active since 2018 in Sant’Arpino, on the outskirts of Naples: an exhibition space and a site of multidisciplinary production and training. Since 2021 it has been developing Oh, ah, sì! Sul fiume fuori rotta (“Oh, ah, yes! On the river off course”), a platform for participatory artistic research along the Volturno river․
Artists։ Maria Giovanna Abbate, Giovanni Ambrosio, Francesco Capasso, Nare Davtyan, Gaetano Fabozzi, Ivan Forastiere, Alessandro Lanciato & Catia Lavino, Andrea Laudante, Carlo Menale, Giovanna Russo, Stefano Savastano, Miho Tanaka, Christian TarantoVella Amazarian, Olga Grechanova, Hrant Kalemkerian, Ruzan Petrosyan, Raphael Reichert.
Curatorial team Opificio Puca
Project managers Andrea Laudante, Maria Giovanna Abbate