July 15–17, 2026
Venues: Casa Cava, Giardino del Silenzio, Le Monacelle, TAM (Tower Art Museum), Parco Scultura la Palomba.
“To gather here, then, is not incidental. It is to enter a terrain where the contradictions of modernity are sedimented in stone.”—Excerpt from Elisa Giuliano's introduction to Roaming Assembly #33: The Script That Passes Through Here—a field of unresolved presence.
Against the backdrop of ongoing genocide, imperial warfare and the rise of techno-feudalism, the DAI community returns to the 10,000 year old city of Matera for COOP SUMMIT 2026—the culmination of this year’s COOP study trajectory. COOP constitutes one, out of DAI's four distinctive curriculum components and foregrounds intensive collaboration and group work empowered by the cooperation between DAI and its core partners: De Appel Amsterdam / Archive Ensemble (Berlin, Dakar, Milan) / Hosting Lands (Copenhagen) / If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam) / Neringa Forest Architecture (Nida, Vilnius, Zurich) / SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, Limbe).
We warmly invite all those who happen to be around Southern Italy on the 15th, 16th, and 17th of July 2026, to join us for three days of thoughtful intra-action.
Moving Through Porosities
Refusing romanticized readings of Matera, Ayris Taban, Bea Secchia, BiBi, Dariya (dar) Trubina, Ginevra Collini, Ivor Glavaš, Jamie Donald, Josse Vessies, Liam Warren, Moss Lutz, Salome Erni, Tomaso de Luca with tutors Chiara Figone and Kamila Metwaly observe Sassi* as living formations shaped by displacement, contamination and cycles of repurposing that resist fixed narrations of “primitive” and “modern.”
Folding Forests
Tended over and through time, forests archive political inflictions and ideologies. To listen to the echoes of erosion and catastrophe, regeneration and abundance Amalie Sveske Ourø, Ella Tegenbos, Emma Caspers, Hannah van der Schaaf, Keit Bonnici, Lío Spinnewijn, Richard Liu, Veronika Marxer, Yindi Chen with tutors Jurga Daubaraitė, Egija Inzule and Jonas Žukauskas bring memories into movements.
Never for the first time
Gathering as one squeaking body reenacting a rehearsal, Ayse Idil Idil, Carlos Azeredo Mesquita, Dory Samuel, Henriks Zegners, Ilja Schamlé, Leo Hugendubel, Nika Pećarina, Olfa Arfaoui, Patrick Freriksen, Rikke Lundgaard Ebling, Sophie Dandanell with tutors Frédérique Bergholtz and Angelo Custodio begin and end with listening. An air mattress full of moist breath in 40+ degree Matera—a foreign body and it listens.
Be a little slow, a little late. (Re)fusing. (Im)printing. Conspiring
God is a search. To search is to chew and swallow a kinship deadened by forced removal, concealment and forbidding. Anahi Saravia Herrera, Dana Andrei, Despina Sanida Crezia, Egle A. Benkunskytė, Fagner Lima, Gianfranco Colla, Muyang Teng, Nanna Stigsdatter Mathiassen, Ratri Notosudirdjo, Zhuang Leng and tutors Mokia Dinnyuy Manjoh and Daniellis Hernandez Calderon all brought salt and hot things. Soup. Salt. Flame. Fabric still warm from the press. Inky paper. Sound you walk into. Singing after. Laughs and laughters. Hot things.
Summoning Water from Stone: Words to be Passed
Moving between geology and speculation, field recording and folklore, between the politics of listening and acts of attunement, Agnese Spolverini, Aimeé Phillips, Asmaa Barakat, Erik Peters, Javier Rodriguez Perez, Jip van der Hek, Oliver Turvey, Rana Kelleci, Sarmistha Bose, Shiva Yourdkhani with tutors Noor Abuarafeh and Marina Christodoulidou ask how narratives travel across soundwaves, carrying resistance across time and space.
The Sweet We Make When Words Aren’t Enough
Inviting you to take your grief to the table—and in the collapse of all language and spectacle, Agnese Krivade, Billie Meiniche, Dimitris Chimonas, Giuliana Beya Dridi, Magdalena Beliavska, Masha Domracheva, Noah Storrs Gokul, Sanna J. Hirvonen, Seta Astreou-Karides, Sharon Romie, Shoshana Walfish, Tara White with tutors Aziza Harmel and Harun Morrison tread, knowing that we owe our freedom to the corpses sleeping beneath us.
*The Sassi di Matera are cave dwellings carved directly into limestone cliffs.
For further information do not hesitate to get in touch with Philippa Driest, COOP Education Leader: philippa@dutchartinstitute.eu
