Terrapolis – Transversal Ecologies Festival
Castiglione dei Pepoli, September 4–6, 2026
This year once again, Terrapolis – Transversal Ecologies Festival invites you to mark the end of summer together in the beautiful landscape of the Bolognese Apennines, in Castiglione dei Pepoli, from September 4 to 6. Now in its sixth edition, the festival dedicates three days to performative, sonic, and collaborative practices connected to ecological thought.
The figure that inspires this year’s edition of Terrapolis is the swarm as a relational mode of existence: an emergent, networked, and non-hierarchical dynamic in which each element contributes to the movement of the whole without the need for a center or predetermined direction. In biology, computer science, social sciences, and robotics, the concept of the swarm describes intelligent and adaptive collective behaviors. Within Terrapolis, it becomes a world-image through which to think about the coexistence of life forms, technologies, materials, and practices that transform and influence one another according to a multiple, situated, and interdependent logic.
This principle is also reflected in the festival’s curatorial approach and structure, which takes shape as an ecosystem composed of heterogeneous materials, forms of writing, and intersections between languages and perspectives. The project values the relationship between individual and collective research, between DIWO (Do It With Others) formats and academic approaches, and between emerging artists and internationally active practitioners. At its core are practices of exchange, learning by doing, and the collaborative construction of knowledge.
The artistic practices involved—ranging from the use of solar energy to fermentation as a vital process, from speculative design to ecosystem regeneration, from material intelligence to cultural memory, and extending to reflections on the relationship between body, care, and technology—develop through hybrid processes, speculative methodologies, and transdisciplinary pathways. In dialogue with the theoretical frameworks of new materialism and concepts such as intra-action and non-human agency, the programme brings together walks, workshops, communal lunches, performances, live music and DJ sets, talks, and presentations from the residencies developed within the European project Creative Landscapes by Opus 58 and Giulia Vigna. The festival also serves as the concluding event of the project, supported by the European Union and carried out in collaboration with the Lithuanian association Miško uostas.
Edition after edition, Terrapolis seeks to propose alternative ways of imagining a future beyond ecological collapse and post-capitalist conditions. It does so collectively: the collective dimension is not only a theme, but a structural practice, a relational device that runs throughout the entire project and defines its methodology.
The festival is co-funded by the European Union.
