Photo credits: Giuseppe Lupinacci
July 8, 2026 | Salerno, Italy
After its intensive stay in the Gulf of Naples, the PartArt4OW Sailing Lab set course for Salerno, arriving at Marina d'Arechi on July 8 for the concluding event of THALASSONIA — a Participatory Art Initiative that has spent the past several months turning marine litter into music.
Photo credits: Giuseppe Lupinacci
From Beach Clean-Ups to Concert Stage
THALASSONIA ("Giving marine litter a voice to restore the Mediterranean") blends citizen science, participatory art, and circular economy principles along the Salerno coastline. Over the course of the project, volunteers from Plastic Free, certified divers from the Lega Navale Italiana, and local citizens carried out repeated clean-ups of beaches, coastal waters, and the seabed, logging their finds with the European Environment Agency's Marine Litter Watch app — including a clean-up and workshop day at Marina di Eboli's Bagno Trentotto, where citizens and schoolchildren helped sort and catalogue the litter collected.
Photo credits: Giuseppe Lupinacci
The collected plastic did not simply disappear into waste streams. At the Marine Ateliers set up at Marina d'Arechi, it was reworked into musical instruments and stage scenography — a slow, hands-on process of turning pollution into sound and awareness into expression.
Video created by Federico Fornaro / Raw-News
Sharing the Magic
The project reached its finale on July 8 with "Sharing the Magic," a large-scale public orchestral concert at Marina d'Arechi timed to coincide with the SailingLab's arrival in Salerno. The instruments built from reclaimed marine debris took the stage under the direction of Francesco Bottigliero, conductor, composer, and THALASSONIA's Artistic Lead, who has described the initiative as a way of showing that "citizens are not spectators — they are protagonists of change" in the face of pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss.
Photo credits: Giuseppe Lupinacci
The concert closed a months-long arc that began with beach clean-ups and Marine Atelier workshops and produced, alongside the performance itself, an open-access Marine Atelier Toolkit — a replicable methodology and pedagogical kit designed so that schools and other coastal communities can run their own version of the project.
A Coastline Under Pressure
Beyond the concert stage, Salerno gave the SailingLab crew a further case study in the tensions the expedition has been documenting all along the Mediterranean coast. Coastal erosion, speculative construction, and unfinished infrastructure projects here point to development models increasingly disconnected from local ecological realities. The team explored one such flashpoint in depth: the environmental conflict surrounding the Porticciolo di Pastena, documented in collaboration with the local committee "Giù le mani dal Porticciolo" ("Hands Off the Little Harbour"), which has been pressing for a more careful, community-informed approach to the area's redevelopment.
Photo credits: Giuseppe Lupinacci
Next Stop: Sardinia
From Salerno, the SailingLab set off on one of the longest legs of its journey — roughly 255 nautical miles toward southwestern Sardinia, with operational stops planned through mid-July. There, sharp contrasts between protected marine ecosystems and luxury tourism infrastructure are expected to shape encounters with fishers, divers, researchers, and local associations, continuing the expedition's documentation of Mediterranean environmental tensions on the way toward the Second Demo Day in Badalona.
Photo credits: Giuseppe Lupinacci
About PartArt4OW
PartArt4OW (Participatory Art For Society Engagement with Ocean and Water) is a Horizon Europe research and innovation project (grant agreement 101157247) coordinated by Sapienza University of Rome and managed by CINEA (European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency). The SailingLab, operationalized by Raw-News in collaboration with Altura sailing society, connects artists, scientists, civic society actors, and local communities across the Mediterranean to co-create knowledge and artistic practices addressing ocean sustainability.
Funding Disclaimer
PartArt4OW is funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101157247. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or CINEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.