Cultural Summit & Transnational Assembly: The Right to Culture

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On 14 November, the doors of Teatro Garibaldi in Palermo open onto a question that belongs to all of Europe: who is culture for?

For three days, from 13 to 15 November, one of Southern Europe’s most storied theatres returns to life.
A space reopening is the right moment to call together the people who keep cultural spaces alive every day, those who run them, those who fight to sustain them, those who try to reimagine them, in Palermo, across Europe, and along both shores of the Mediterranean.
Together with Fondazione Studio Rizoma, we are turning the occasion into a day-long Cultural Summit & Transnational Assembly on the right to culture.

Cultural spaces are often described as infrastructure: venues, buildings, programmes. But what matters is not only their physical form, but the relationships they make possible and the futures they let us imagine. A neighbourhood theatre, an occupied factory, a library, a biennial born far from any capital: each sets its own rules of who may enter, who is seen, who takes part. And today these spaces are under pressure as rarely before, squeezed by rising rents, tourism, shrinking public investment and the constant demand to prove their worth in numbers.

So we want to ask, together: whose right to culture is it? Who can cross the threshold of a space, and who is left outside? Who keeps it open and accessible, and by what means? These are not abstract questions. What is tried out in Palermo has something to say to Brussels, to Athens, to Tunis, and the other way around.

The morning opens with a panel bringing local and international voices into conversation on the right to culture: to whom it belongs, who cares for it, and how it might become a common good.
In the afternoon, the room itself becomes the work: participants gather around parallel tables, each one a space to move from listening to shared thinking, to exchange practices and trace possible connections. The emerged proposals born at the tables will feed into the future programming of Teatro Garibaldi and into the ties between the spaces that take part.

The Summit is free and open to all, in Italian and English, with registration required.

14 November 2026, 11.00–17.30 · Teatro Garibaldi, Palermo · Part of the Grand Opening (13–15 November) · Free entry, registration required.

REGISTER HERE