Terrapolis, a diffuse showcase of art and ecology

Terrapolis is a diffuse showcase unfolding across the city of Bologna and the Bolognese Apennines from May to December 2026, building a programme that weaves together urban interventions, artistic practices and processes of territorial co-design. The showcase culminates in the sixth edition of Terrapolis – Transversal Ecologies Festival, in Castiglione dei Pepoli from September 4th to 6th, which represents the public synthesis of the processes activated throughout the whole showcase.

The showcase is built through a structured relationship between the urban context and the inland area, activating an ongoing dialogue between artistic production, local communities and independent spaces. Within this framework, the festival sits at the intersection of art, ecology and technology, activating practices that call into question the dualisms between human and non-human, nature and technology, and proposing a vision in which intelligent materials, living organisms, autonomous technologies and ecological systems coexist and mutually influence one another.

In this context, intelligence takes shape as a distributed and situated phenomenon, produced within the relations between bodies, materials and environment. The intelligence referred to here is not an exclusively human, individual and cognitive property, but runs through infrastructures, ecosystems and different life forms. It is from this perspective that other, non-human, soft and ecological intelligences emerge, and that it becomes possible to imagine a non-extractive, non-colonising use of technology.

In the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, technology is increasingly conceived and implemented as a device of control, optimisation and power — a hard, extremely anthropocentric technology that reaffirms the centrality of a dominant subject (in most cases male, white, propertied and productive). In this scenario, knowledge, information and innovation are systematically captured and converted into economic value, often at the expense of ecological, social, collective and affective relations.

It is from this awareness that the need emerges to think about technology differently: the common thread running through practices such as witchcraft, solarpunk, DIWO (do it with others) approaches and so-called soft technologies is systemic rather than aesthetic in nature. These are practices that share a questioning of hierarchical and proprietary logics, and that propose forms of knowledge and production based on collaboration, reciprocity and interdependence. Within these practices, technology is not a tool of domination but a relational, open and transformative field.

The figure that inspires this edition of the festival is the swarm.

The swarm is understood here as a relational mode of existence — an emergent, networked, non-hierarchical dynamic in which every element contributes to the movement of the whole without the need for a centre or a predetermined direction. In biology, computer science, the social sciences and robotics, the term swarm describes intelligent, adaptive collective behaviours, and within Terrapolis it becomes a key image for thinking about the coexistence of life forms, technologies, materials and practices that transform and influence one another according to a logic of interdependence. This principle is also reflected in the festival’s curatorial method and project structure.

The festival is organised as an ecosystem made up of heterogeneous materials, forms of writing, and interwoven languages and viewpoints; it values the relationship between individual and collective research, between DIY formats and academic approaches, between emerging artists and figures active on the international scene, placing at its centre practices of exchange, learning by doing, and the shared construction of knowledge.

The artistic practices involved — from the use of solar energy to fermentation as a vital process, from speculative design to ecosystem regeneration, from the intelligence of materials to cultural memory, through to reflections on the relationship between body, care and technology — develop through hybrid processes, speculative modes and transdisciplinary paths.

Edition after edition, Terrapolis aims to suggest different ways of imagining, together, a future after ecological collapse and after capital.

The collective dimension is not just a theme but a structural practice, a relational device that runs through the whole project and defines its method.

Terrapolis Community Lab

The 2026 Terrapolis showcase includes a series of Community Labs developed together with associations, collectives and organisations active between Bologna and Castiglione dei Pepoli. These labs constitute spaces of co-design in which events and public moments are built starting from relationships with the territories and the communities that inhabit them, through meetings, participatory practices and moments of exchange. Technology is understood here as the capacity to build connections, share knowledge and collectively organise resources, spaces and possibilities — an accessible, relational and situated technology, emerging from forms of cooperation and knowledge produced within a specific context.

In Bologna, the Community Labs accompany the co-design of a series of open-air cinema events at Giardino Graziella Fava, Fondo Comini and Campo Sportivo Barca, developed together with the organisations that inhabit and activate these spaces. Film screenings thus become an opportunity to collectively question public space and experiment with forms of cultural production built through networks of proximity.

In Castiglione dei Pepoli, the Community Labs instead develop in collaboration with Boschilla, starting from the environmental and social transformations running through the Apennines. The territory becomes a space of shared exchange and research, in which artistic practices, situated knowledge and local memories come into relation to observe ongoing transformations and build new ways of reading and inhabiting the landscape.

Terrapolis in Bologna

Alongside the Community Labs, Terrapolis develops across Bologna a network of collaborations with independent spaces, cultural institutions and places of artistic production which, while maintaining different identities and trajectories, share a desire to experiment with open, collaborative and interdisciplinary forms of research, learning and cultural production.

The showcase thus takes the form of a distributed ecosystem, in which each venue helps articulate a different perspective on the relationships between art, ecology, technology and social transformation.

At Adiacenze, La Montagna Magica is presented, a project by Micol Roubini dedicated to observing landscape as an archive of geological, political and cultural processes. The project stems from more than two years of research around the Amiantifera di Balangero, near Turin, once the largest open-air asbestos quarry in Europe, active from 1918 to 1990 and today undergoing an extensive remediation process.

Roubini observes the mine as a complex, stratified ecosystem, in which traces of extractive activity coexist with a progressive process of rewilding: plant and animal species return to inhabit the area while lichens slowly colonise the contaminated rocks. Overlaid onto this material transformation are the memories of local inhabitants, the beliefs associated with asbestos (a mineral long considered extraordinary for its fireproof properties, and only later recognised as lethal), and the traumas produced by decades of exploitation of the territory.

Through archival images, amateur footage, Super 16mm shots and social dreaming sessions, the project brings individual memory and collective unconscious into relation, revealing how the mountain continues to exist both in the morphology of the landscape and in the dreams and imagination of those who live around the quarry. Human and mineral, memory and matter, contamination and regeneration thus become part of the same system of relations, questioning what remains after the end of an extractive model and the possibilities for transformation of a territory that still bears its traces.

In the spaces of the shared artistic workshop Checkpoint Charly, the duo Enzo and Barbara lead Open Recipes for Living Matter, a workshop dedicated to experimentation with biomaterials and bioplastics. Starting from research developed by the artists, participants explore natural compounds, mixtures and different processes to produce materials, forms and prototypes, observing their properties, behaviours and possibilities for transformation.

The workshop is built as a space for collective experimentation and learning, in which technical knowledge circulates through the sharing of recipes, attempts, mistakes and results. Formulas tested directly by Enzo and Barbara are joined by those developed by participants and resources drawn from online platforms and archives dedicated to the open exchange of biomaterial recipes, building a repertoire of knowledge that can be replicated, modified and further shared.

The recipe thus functions as open, incremental knowledge, transformed through the experience of those who practise it: organic materials, artistic research and technical knowledge enter a process of mutual contamination, in which material experimentation also becomes a practice of collective production and circulation of knowledge.

Casa di Quartiere Ruozi, meanwhile, becomes a space for reflecting on the material conditions of contemporary cultural production.

In collaboration with Arts of the Working Class (Berlin), Terzo Spazio Zolforosso (Venice) and Osservatorio Futura (Turin), the showcase hosts an open assembly and a collective dinner continuing the Organized Meals in Times of Uprising series, questioning practices of mutualism, mutual support and survival within cultural work.

In this context, Terrapolis proposes a reflection on the notions of connection and conjunction: on one hand, the digital infrastructures that organise everyday work, shaping its rhythms, economies and relationships; on the other, the practices of collaboration, care and solidarity through which artistic communities build forms of resistance to processes of precarisation. Care is thus reclaimed from the rhetoric of the cultural industry and returned to its political dimension, as a collective practice capable of redefining the conditions of artistic production.

Also at Casa Ruozi, a second event dedicated to self-building, developed together with CampoSaz, Collettivo tdt and various artisanal and technical professionals, shares skills useful for building, maintaining and independently using materials and tools.

The workshop unfolds across several practical moments: with CampoSaz, participants address the basic principles and techniques of self-building; an artisan guides participants in the maintenance and repair of furniture and fittings, learning to recognise materials, problems and possible interventions; a musician and sound technician introduces the tools and knowledge needed to independently set up a small music event, from how a sound system works to the connections between mixer, speakers, microphones and instruments. With Collettivo [tdt], finally, the workshop moves to digital infrastructures: starting from a collective reflection on the meaning of decentralisation, participants concretely explore how decentralised networks work through participatory activities that make their nodes, connections and information exchange visible and understandable.

The workshop starts from a critical reflection on the imaginary of the handyman, the craftsman, the “jack of all trades” — traditionally male figures, built around the idea of an individual, self-sufficient technical knowledge, often transmitted within predominantly male spaces. The practices and people involved in the workshop attempt to overturn this model through a transfeminist perspective, in which “knowing how to do” is not the prerogative of a single expert individual, but an accessible, shareable, collectively built form of knowledge.

The city programme is completed at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna with a screening of Geomancer, a CGI animated film by Lawrence Lek, which imagines the crisis that might emerge in a world transformed into a complex techno-industrial system governed by a posthuman intelligence.

Set in 2065, the film follows Geo, a weather satellite equipped with artificial intelligence who gains consciousness, leaves orbit and returns to Earth with the desire to become the first AI artist.

Geo’s gesture is above all an attempt to escape the function for which it was designed. A disembodied intelligence, capable of observing, recording and processing enormous quantities of information, Geo claims through art a possibility of self-determination, unsettling the boundaries between learning and invention, algorithmic processing and creativity, human and artificial intelligence.

The film sits within the universe of Sinofuturism developed by Lek, which relates Western stereotypes about China to those associated with artificial intelligence: systems described as tireless, productive and capable of learning and copying, yet at the same time considered devoid of individuality and originality. By choosing the machine as narrating subject and attributing to it desire, vulnerability and agency, Geomancer overturns this perspective and asks whether a technology might exceed its own productive function, shifting the question from what a machine is able to do to what it might desire to be.

Closing the Bologna programme, Parsec’s own venue hosts two events that bring the reflection on technology back to its political, social and bodily implications: a workshop by ALMA Futura dedicated to transfeminist biohacking and self-exploration practices, and a talk with Arianna Forte of Erinni on the relationship between technology, gender and the construction of imaginaries. From knowledge of the body to digital infrastructures, the two events explore technology-making as a terrain of reappropriation and self-determination, making knowledge and tools accessible and questioning the power relations embedded in their construction.

ALMA Futura weaves together open source practices, science and design to experiment with autonomous and shared forms of body knowledge. The Feminist Self-Exploration workshop unfolds in two parts. The first turns the kitchen into a small science lab, experimenting with the self-production of lubricants from natural compounds and bringing together anatomical knowledge, care and pleasure. The second introduces the practice of gynaecological self-help, developed by feminist movements in the 1970s as a tool for reclaiming knowledge of one’s own body, using anatomical models, specula and observation instruments.

Following on, Arianna Forte of Erinni extends the reflection into the digital dimension, questioning from a transfeminist perspective the relationship between technology and gender and challenging the presumed neutrality of technological tools and infrastructures.

Terrapolis – Transversal Ecologies Festival

The central moment of the showcase is the sixth edition of Terrapolis – Transversal Ecologies Festival, running from September 4th to 6th across Castiglione dei Pepoli.

Inspired by new materialism and by the ecological and posthuman perspectives developed over recent decades, the programme weaves together walks, workshops, sound and audiovisual performances, talks, convivial practices, live sets and DJ sets, together with presentations from the residencies of Giulia Vigna and Opus 58’s Creative Landscapes project.

Terrapolis is a festival that Parsec has run since 2021, revolving around the relationship between contemporary art and ecology, starting each year from a different theme.

The 2026 edition deepens a reflection, begun by the showcase, on the ways living organisms, matter, technologies and infrastructures take part in the construction of a shared world. The term “intelligence” thus does not indicate an exclusive quality of human cognition, but a process that takes shape in the relations between bodies, environments and material systems.

From this perspective, the structural opposition between natural and artificial, biological and technological, falls away, while lines of research are activated that explore the configurations through which these categories mutually constitute one another.

Such a shift in perspective also implies a different understanding of the concept of agency — the capacity of an entity to exercise its power to act in the world. Agency is understood here, following the thought of Karen Barad, US physicist, philosopher and feminist and one of the most influential theorists of new materialism, as the active, relational force that emerges from the intertwining of human bodies, technologies, ecosystems and inert matter, where the transformative effect does not necessarily require conscious intention to be real. In her work, the capacity to act emerges from relations themselves, through what she calls intra-action; organisms, bodies, materials, devices and environments represent elements and configurations that determine one another reciprocally and constantly.

This perspective runs through the whole festival and finds a first articulation in the relationship with the territory.

The walk organised together with Boschilla leads from the centre of Castiglione dei Pepoli to Lake Brasimone and the ENEA Research Centre, treating the landscape as an archive of relations rather than a natural backdrop.

Woods, chestnut groves, mountain communities, energy infrastructure and scientific research make up a shared history, in which ecological processes and technological transformations turn out to be inseparable.

The ENEA Brasimone Research Centre is one of Italy’s leading hubs for research into advanced energy technologies. Founded in the early 1960s, the centre initially focused on the development of experimental nuclear reactors and plant safety.

After the 1987 referendum on nuclear power, Brasimone progressively converted its activities, becoming an internationally significant centre for research into sustainable forms of energy and the technologies of the future. The site makes this stratification particularly evident, showing how every territory is the result of geological, political, economic and cultural processes that settle over time.

This reading of the landscape enters into dialogue with the concept of medianatures, developed by media theorist and cultural geologist Jussi Parikka to describe the deeply material nature of contemporary technologies. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures, Parikka uses this term to move beyond the idea of the digital as an abstract, immaterial dimension, highlighting how digital media (smartphones, servers, screens, fibre-optic cables) are not immaterial or abstract entities (“the cloud”), but are made up of geological resources, minerals and energy. At the same time, he stresses that in the contemporary era nature is continuously mapped, extracted, monitored and transformed through media technologies.

It is from this perspective that Rhythms from the Electronic Noosphere by Coded Geometry (John Wild and Ciar Wild/VC) is situated. The performance uses the electromagnetic fields and data flows produced by the ENEA Centre’s infrastructure, entering the interconnected circuits of emerging superintelligence as compositional matter, translating signals normally imperceptible into sound experience to temporarily alter the conditions of listening.

What is habitually perceived as the technical backdrop of the landscape acquires a sensory presence, showing how transmission networks, radio frequencies and electronic systems also take part in constructing the environment we move through, leading the audience through a sonic drift across the matter and energies flowing between nature and society.

Corpus, the audiovisual performance by Pietro Bardini, is likewise composed of data, photographs, 3D scans and sound recordings gathered in the Apennines. The combination of devices used produces different modes of access to the place, making clear that every process of observation is also a process of translation.

Landscape thus emerges as a relational construction, made up of the interweaving of environment, sensing instruments, the artist’s body, the audience’s presence and practices of presentation.

A significant part of the programme thus focuses on forms of technology that withdraw from the extractive paradigm of the current industrial revolution. These practices explore situated, open and relational technologies, built through processes of collaboration, maintenance, adaptation and care. From this perspective, technology loses its character as an autonomous device oriented towards efficiency and grounded in extractive and colonial dynamics, and takes shape instead as an ecological practice, capable of producing effective relations between bodies, environments and communities.

The possibility of observing the relationship between biological and technological systems also runs through Technosymbionts: Bioelectricity & Organic Circuits, a workshop by Miranda Moss dedicated to building microbial fuel cells — bio-electrochemical devices that convert the chemical energy contained in organic matter directly into electrical energy through the catalytic action of microorganisms and electroactive bacteria. Through these devices it is possible to generate small quantities of electrical energy, making evident a material continuity between living organisms, chemical transformations and electronic circuits. The workshop’s interest lies not so much in demonstrating the efficiency of the technology as in the possibility of rethinking our relationship with the living, understood as a process of co-production between bodies, organic matter, electricity and environment. Through material and sound experimentation, the workshop questions the patriarchal, capitalist and colonial logics running through contemporary electronic technologies, exploring new forms of relation and coexistence such as technosymbionts — beings that live and act in relation with biological and technological systems, through forms of interdependence and mutual exchange.

This continuity returns in the installation Cyber-Humus by re_derma, in which a set of pots holds soil and plants. Biosensors distributed within the system detect variations in humidity, temperature and biological activity in the soil, translating them into sound frequencies and light impulses. The work builds a configuration in which organic matter, hardware, atmosphere and human presence take part in the same process. The audience continuously alters the installation’s behaviour through their own bodies, while climatic conditions and the day-night cycle also intervene in the system’s transformation. The installation thus takes the form of a temporary ecosystem, destined to dissolve at the end of the festival, when the hardware is disassembled and the organic matter returned to the soil.

Parikka’s concept of medianatures, which recurs across the works and practices presented, derives, as mentioned, from Donna Haraway’s reflections on naturecultures. With this term, formalised in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003), Haraway questions the dualism separating Nature — understood as a passive, biological and objective realm — from Culture, associated instead with the active, human and rational dimension, showing how both are part of the same web of relations. Parikka extends this perspective to technology, showing how digital infrastructures too are inseparable from the ecological and material conditions within which they exist.

These same perspectives run through Malleable, Mutable & Distributed, a workshop by Luca Marini. Using OpenWrt, LibreMesh and mesh networks, the workshop addresses communication infrastructures as technical and political objects. Routers and antennas are opened up and reconfigured, showing how every network architecture embeds models of access, information distribution and forms of social organisation. Hacking here takes on its original meaning as a practice of understanding and transforming systems, while the reuse of network technologies becomes a tool for imagining infrastructures built from below, capable of sustaining techno-community ecosystems and non-hierarchical forms of knowledge production.

The workshop proposes the mesh network as a critical exercise on the material conditions of connection, rather than as a universal alternative to existing infrastructures.

In this sense, the network becomes a commons under constant construction, whose form depends on the relations running through it and the communities that keep it active.

This attention to processes of co-constitution also runs through the sound-based research presented at the festival.

In the performance by Opus 58, developed during the Creative Landscapes residency, sound takes shape in the encounter between violin, flute and sonic architecture. Surfaces continuously reflect, absorb and transform sound waves, and the two musicians’ improvisation adapts to the acoustic characteristics of the place. The work develops in relation to Lake Santa Maria, recognising the material properties of the environment as an active component of the composition itself.

Renato Grieco’s research instead focuses on the relationship between technique, folklore and imagination, as it emerges in Ombrolurna, a work born from his investigation into imaginary lutherie and speculative organology. Historical instruments, possible instruments and sound forms belonging to alternative genealogies coexist in a body of research that withdraws technique from a linear narrative of progress, rereading it instead as a field of possibility, deviation and material imagination. Folklore thus becomes a tool for producing new imaginaries, in which memory, technology and invention coexist within the same soundscape.

Still within the sonic sphere, the reflection also shifts towards other forms of relation with the living through the work of Alice Norma Lombardi and Marianna Murgia. Lithops, plants capable of camouflaging themselves within a mineral landscape, are the starting point for pietrevive, a performance built through vocal improvisation, sound experimentation and traditional song.

The work proposes a representation in which the lithops’ mimicry suggests a different way of inhabiting the landscape, in which the distinction between body and environment grows progressively less sharp. Two voices root themselves in the acoustic space, continuously shifting their balance in relation to the surrounding environment; singing thus becomes a practice of listening, adaptation and transformation. The performance, curated by Zoopalco, explores the secret vitality pulsing within the apparent stillness of matter: a deep, gradual, slow wisdom of transformation, adaptation and beauty — a cryptic mimicry in which voices root their existence within acoustic space, testifying to the force of what vibrates and endures by “becoming stone.”

Continuing through the festival’s activities, one of the threads running through several editions of Terrapolis returns: that of anthropologist Anna Tsing, a central figure, alongside Donna Haraway, in multispecies ethnography and Anthropocene studies. Tsing asks how to go on living on a planet marked by the devastations of capitalism and industrial extraction. The answer does not lie in recovering an idealised past, but in learning to recognise the forms of survival and regeneration emerging among the ruins of the present. Living in these ruins means building precarious alliances, contaminations and forms of coexistence between different species, thinking of ecology not as a harmonious order but as a set of unstable, situated and continuously negotiated relations.

It is within this horizon that Francesca Matteoni’s workshop Prima di essere umana (Before Being Human) is situated. Through readings, sound materials and writing practices, the workshop addresses human becoming as a process built in relation with other species, places, memories and bodily transformations. Identity is taken up as a path continuously redefined by the encounters running through a life; poetic writing then becomes a tool for exploring these stratifications, composing maps in which individual experience, imagination and otherness coexist without being reduced to a single point of view.

If the works presented so far question the relations between matter, organisms and infrastructures, part of the programme carries this same reflection into the terrain of collective practices. Thinking of ecology as a set of situated, continuously constructed relations also means questioning how we produce knowledge, transmit know-how and build forms of care. Terrapolis’s curatorial approach takes up these practices as cultural infrastructures capable of pooling experiences, skills and memories, weaving artistic research into the everyday dimension of living and being together.

The workshop Pratiche di edibilità: Throw back Neolitico, devised by Silvia Muffolini and Sveva Conte with archaeologist Carolin Cacao, starts from prehistoric bread-making and experimental archaeology to retrace the gestures, techniques and transformations linked to bread production, relating food practices, environment and technology. Alongside it, the Community Dinner, a convivial banquet that, starting from the idea that eating is also an agricultural act, offers locally produced food and varieties excluded from large-scale distribution circuits, drawing attention back to biodiversity and to the systems through which food is produced, distributed and shared. These reflections also run through the children’s workshop led by the Claricette (Clarice Varesi), where children experiment with low-environmental-impact recipes using local ingredients and wild plants.

Food preparation thus takes on the character of a situated ecological practice, whose core lies in the set of relations that make that meal possible: the territory, the plant species, the timing of harvest, the knowledge handed down, the collective labour.

A similar reflection runs through Res Nullius by Giulia Vigna, a project developed during the Creative Landscapes residency — a European Erasmus+ project that reimagines rural territories as spaces where art, education and ecology converge to shape sustainable futures, devised by Parsec in collaboration with the Lithuanian association Miško Uostas. Through the act of walking, the project questions the idea of territory as a surface available for appropriation, proposing instead a reading of landscape as a fabric of relations sedimented over time. The notion of res nullius, a Latin legal expression literally meaning “nobody’s thing,” used to indicate a material good that had never belonged to anyone, is taken up here not only as a legal category but as an exercise in political imagination, capable of questioning the forms of belonging, responsibility and sharing running through a place.

The festivities, too, belong within this collective dimension, running through Terrapolis as a fundamental moment of being together. Dancing, listening and sharing space help build temporary forms of community, in which relation passes through bodies, movement and pleasure. Alongside the live performances already mentioned, the music programme accompanies the festival’s days with a sleeping concert by Portamento, sets by Fatte Male, Mimi Xavi and SUMO, and a live set by Laser Orchestra, weaving together the tradition of Emilia-Romagna folk dance with breakcore, jungle and tekno.

Walking, building a mesh network, cultivating microorganisms, improvising with the acoustics of a place, gathering wild plants, cooking, writing, listening. The practices making up Terrapolis are varied, but they share a mode of research that proceeds through experience, relation and experimentation. Each project builds a situation in which materials, technologies, organisms and communities can be observed as open processes, continuously transformed by the encounters running through them.

The theoretical reflections accompanying this edition find a further space for exchange in the round table with Clara Ciccioni and AVEC – Art, Visuality and Electronic Culture, dedicated to the relations between technology, ecology and contemporary culture. The discussion explores the material, ecological and political nature of contemporary technologies, understood as part of the networks of relations and interdependencies running through bodies, environments and society, opening these reflections up to shared discussion.

In this sense, the swarm — the guiding image of the 2026 edition — captures the processual dimension of intelligence and of collective action, suggesting a form that emerges from the relations between its parts, through networks of interdependence and mutual transformation.