Verso Sud

Verso Sud is a public art and performing arts project, born in 2015 in the north-Bari Murgia with epicenter Corato, curated by APS Lavorare Stanca.

The artistic and cultural identity of Verso Sud is in the union of different artistic languages (poetry, literature, music, theatre, performance, public art, installations, etc) which become languages of connection within the community, through site-specific performative activities, public art actions and multidisciplinary educational projects. No language, no work, can be placed and read as elements in their own right, but rather as the fruit of a series of relationships: Verso Sud is an open work, a living organism, a cultural ecosystem.

The project was born in 2015 in the form of a multidisciplinary festival and has developed offshoots over the years that have become consolidated projects over time. This natural, serendepic and horizontal development of the project is in strong analogy with the development of natural ecosystems, which do not have top-down formats and structures according to which they develop, rather they are in perpetual dance and dynamic harmony, where every element, even the most small and negligible plays a vital role.

After starting as a festival, this is what Verso Sud is becoming: a cultural ecosystem, made up of people, organisations, places and projects.
People and organizations: they are the real foundations, the connections that carry the project. The Verso Sud team is heterogeneous with different professional and personal experiences, made up of various figures who deal with various fields such as literature, art, economics, urban and social regeneration, education and architecture. To date, the team is made up of 10 people in stable collaboration, which up to 40 collaborators and 100 volunteers during the productions.

Places are the earth, the air and the profound nature of what we do and how we do it. Since the very beginning of the project, Verso Sud has been a festival of places, of their hidden lyricism, of a metaphysics kept among stones, traditions, languages and the limits of territories. With the cultural ecosystem, we want this identity and visionary trait to become structural in its development path.

The projects, on the other hand, are the winds of this ecosystem, changeable by nature, they are directions and tensions of shared growth, capable of transporting, connecting and expanding the ecosystem into other spaces, other geographies naturally, in deep listening with what is already there.