TERRAPOLIS – Distributed Programme
May–December 2026
Terrapolis is a distributed cultural programme taking place between Bologna and the Bolognese Apennines from May to December 2026, bringing together neighbourhood-based urban interventions, artistic practices, and processes of territorial co-design.
The programme culminates in the sixth edition of Terrapolis – Transversal Ecologies Festival, taking place in Castiglione dei Pepoli from September 4–6, serving as a public moment of convergence for the processes activated throughout the entire programme. The project is rooted in a structured relationship between the urban context and inland territories, fostering an ongoing dialogue between artistic production, local communities, and independent cultural spaces.
As every year, Terrapolis explores the relationship between art and ecology. The 2026 edition focuses on non-human intelligences, smart materials, and autonomous, soft, and ecological technologies, imagined beyond extractive and colonial logics. The programme stems from the need to rethink technology through practices such as witchcraft, solarpunk, and DIWO (Do It With Others) methodologies, proposing forms of knowledge and production grounded in collaboration, reciprocity, and interdependence.
Terrapolis thus positions itself at the intersection of art, ecology, and technology through practices that challenge traditional dualisms between human and non-human, nature and technology. What emerges is a vision in which intelligent materials, living organisms, autonomous technologies, and ecological systems coexist and mutually influence one another.
Within this perspective, intelligence reveals itself as a distributed and situated phenomenon, generated through the relationships between bodies, materials, and environments: no longer an exclusively human, individual, and cognitive property, but a force that traverses infrastructures, ecosystems, and diverse forms of life.
From this standpoint emerge other forms of intelligence—non-human, soft, and ecological—and the possibility of imagining technologies that are neither extractive nor colonising.
The programme will unfold through a network of collaborations with neighbourhood centres, associations, collectives, independent initiatives, and art spaces active across the region, including Adiacenze, Boschilla, Casa di Quartiere Ruozi, Checkpoint Charly, Fondo Comini, Regaz dei Fava, and Radio Cap.
In Bologna, the project will give rise to a city-wide programme of exhibitions, talks, performative and sound-based practices, screenings, and public discussion events, hosted at Parsec and in various locations throughout the city. Local and international artists and collectives will be invited to engage with the themes of the programme through interventions and activities open to the public.
At the same time, a series of Community Labs will be activated to co-design outdoor cinema events at Giardino Graziella Fava, Fondo Comini, and Campo Sportivo Barca, developed together with the communities that inhabit and use these spaces. In Castiglione dei Pepoli, the Community Labs organised in collaboration with Boschilla will focus on the environmental and social transformations affecting the Apennines through participatory practices and activities developed with local residents.
The complete and regularly updated programme will be announced monthly through our social media channels.
PROGRAMME
