Powered by REF is a project by Romaeuropa Festival dedicated to the new generations of the Italian contemporary scene: a space designed to support artists under 30 in the early stages of their research across theatre, performance, and hybrid languages. Each year it selects three emerging projects, offering mentorship, residencies, and concrete opportunities for growth and exchange. In the 2026 edition, the programme renews its commitment to intercepting radical visions, unconventional formats, and new artistic sensibilities. The project is realised in collaboration with Carrozzerie | n.o.t, with residencies co-produced with Twain and Settimo Cielo, and in partnership with ATCL / Spazio Rossellini, Teatro Biblioteca Quarticciolo, 369gradi srl, and Cranpi.
The scenic fragments of the selected projects, presented within the Anni Luce section of Romaeuropa Festival at the Mattatoio, represent the first restitution of this process.
This is not an airport
Every year, according to the WHO, 720,000 people, one day, decide it is enough, and with a shot, a leap, an overdose, they choose to leave. We call them suicides, afterwards. But suicides are around us, before. Alive. We cross their eyes every day. Before the train, the gun, the pills, the rooftop of the university. Alive. Alongside them, among the living, there are also people who keep living and commit a kind of translated suicide: they stop. They kill a part of themselves: writing, theatre, sport, dreams. They tear away a piece of themselves and continue to live.
This project is called This is not an airport.
It comes from an online meme phrase: a response to someone leaving a group who writes a farewell message. “This is not an airport, no need to announce your departure.”
This is not an airport. There is no need to announce your departure.
Could there be anything more violent than denying the need to verbalize the farewell of someone who is leaving?
How many people leave while we keep telling them, in different ways, this is not an airport?
What response do we give to those who are about to go?
This is not an airport is a scenographic object about those who leave.
It investigates the ways people leave and the need to tell the world about it. The project explores suicide as a real-world datum and the invisible forms of abandonment: stopping, giving up, disappearing while still alive. The research draws on materials collected online: hundreds of videos, posts, public confessions that construct a dramaturgy based on repetition, seriality, and the memetic circulation of pain. The stage space is a hybrid environment crossed by pre-existing textual and visual flows, in which original writing confronts and is contaminated by these voices.
Project tutor: Pau Palacios (Agrupación Señor Serrano)
He has performed in productions by Carmelo Rifici (Dittico della bufera), Kepler-452 (Comizi d’amore; A place of safety), Gabriele Vacis (Risveglio di primavera), Valerio Binasco (Hamlet), and RezzaMastrella (Bacio). He worked as dramaturg on Medea in Corinto for the Donizetti Opera and took part in the international project R-Evolution in Chile with the project Letargo.
Alongside this, he has developed his own artistic practice as an author. In 2019 he won odiolestate with Questa lettera sul pagliaccio morto, which premiered at the Piccolo Teatro Grassi for Tramedautore 2020 and was produced in 2022 by Teatro i. In 2020 he won the Nuove Sensibilità 2.0 award with Appunti per un testo sulla fine del mondo. In 2023 he debuted as director with Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons by Sam Steiner, produced by Nuovo Teatro Sanità.
In 2025 he directed and performed in Assetati by Wajdi Mouawad for Teatro di Napoli – Teatro Nazionale, winner of the Leo de Berardinis Award. His latest text, Bacio sogno autodistruzione, selected by Willem Dafoe as the winner of Biennale College Drammaturgia 2025, will premiere as a staged reading at Biennale Teatro 2026, directed by Alessandro Businaro.
This is not an airport is his first stage writing project.
dramaturgy Andrea Dante Benazzo
