Ai Confini dell'Arte

A festival that lives on the edges

Ai Confini dell'Arte is a cross-media project conceived and organized by Margine Operativo, a Roman company active since 2001, also known for the Attraversamenti Multipli festival. Launched in 2017, the project moves along the blurred lines between contemporary art forms—performing arts, dance, theater, visual arts, photography, comics, music, and video—operating in the proximity between art and daily life to generate constant boundary-crossings. The artistic direction is led by Alessandra Ferraro and Pako Graziani.

The festival takes place in Rome, in the heart of the Lazio region, but deliberately chooses to avoid the historic center. Instead, it inhabits the neighborhoods of East Rome: Pigneto and Torpignattara in Municipality V, and Quadraro and Cinecittà in Municipality VII. Intercultural libraries, youth centers, independent spaces, neighborhood parks, and streets transform into laboratories, rehearsal rooms, and stages.

Workshops, residencies, and urban interventions

The project is structured as a journey rather than a traditional festival of performances. At its heart are free workshops led by artists from the contemporary Italian and European performing scene. Each workshop lasts several days and concludes with a public presentation—an urban action, a performance, or a screening—followed by a talk open to participants and passersby alike.

Alongside the workshops, the festival hosts artistic residencies, providing a protected space for artists and companies to develop new site-specific creations, with public openings of the processes still in progress. This is a precise poetic choice: to show art in the making, not just the finished result. The audience is not a passive spectator but shares the same space as the artists, allowing the neighborhood itself to become the raw material of the creation.

Disciplines in dialogue

• Dance and physical theater, with research practices on the body in public space
• Digital arts and videomapping, with projections on urban facades and surfaces
• Sound research and the acoustic landscape of the neighborhoods
• Urban performance, drift, and walking as an artistic device
• Video art and documentation of creative processes

A project supported by Roma Capitale

Over the years, Ai Confini dell'Arte has grown within the cultural programs of Roma Capitale, including Contemporaneamente Roma and Culture in Movimento, and more recently as a winner of the Roma Creativa 365 call for entries from the Department of Culture. This public support allows the festival to maintain a constant commitment since its first edition: all activities are completely free, with only an email registration required for limited-capacity workshops.

Why it is worth attending

Those looking for a grand stage and a lineup of famous names will not find it here. Instead, Ai Confini dell'Arte is an opportunity for those who want to dive deep into contemporary artistic work: to experience a performative practice firsthand, understand how a creation is born, and meet artists in a neighborhood library or a park in Quadraro. It is also one of the most authentic ways to discover the Rome that lives beyond the postcards—the Rome of the peripheral municipalities where cultural life is built through self-managed spaces, associations, and multicultural communities.

The festival typically takes place between the second half of November and mid-December, spanning a month of activities across multiple venues. For those visiting Rome during those weeks, it offers a precious alternative to standard tourist circuits: a widespread, free festival where the boundary between artist and citizen is always on the verge of being crossed.