XVI Edition 2026 — Preferiremmo andare fuori strada

The Video Sound Art Festival presents its 16th edition, entitled Preferiremmo andare fuori strada (We Would Rather Go Off Road) taking place from 19 to 22 November 2026 at Fondazione Galleria Milano, Cartoleria e Tipografia Bonvini 1909 and the Mincio swimming pool in the Lodi-Corvetto district of Milan.

The 16th edition features installations, performances and artistic interventions by Cem A., Ode de Kort, Michele Di Stefano, Edizioni Brigantino and Lucia Pescador, as well as a screening programme featuring video works by Ila Bêka, Meriem Bennani, Jordi Colomer, Thomas Hirschhorn, Marta Innocenti, Florence Lazar, Louise Lemoine, Randa Maroufi, Uriel Orlow, Nicola Pellegrini and Ottonella Moccellin.

Concept

Opening a space does not always mean making it accessible, just as closing it does not necessarily imply exclusion. Urban interventions are reminiscent of remakes of great films: they celebrate utopian potential while revealing its contradictions.

Preferiremmo andare fuori strada (We Would Rather Go Off Road) is the title of the festival’s sixteenth edition, which, after two years, returns to Milan’s Lodi Corvetto neighbourhood in the post-Olympic period.

The previous edition approached the home as a critical device through which to reflect on the dynamics of belonging and exclusion. Preferiremmo andare fuori strada (We Would Rather Go Off Road) acknowledges the increasingly precarious and often displaced experience of bodies within urban space, as an effect of the economic, political and cultural processes that determine access to it.

Through artistic practices and opportunities for encounter, the festival seeks to temporarily suspend the conventional functions assigned to certain places in the neighbourhood. It explores the potential for unexpected encounters and new geographies that the urban condition can activate when artistic, pedagogical and convivial perspectives, practices and poetics converge.

Over the past fifteen years, Video Sound Art has developed educational and exhibition programmes in numerous spaces across the city, each inhabited by its own community. The creation of each edition has always been preceded by the establishment of a relationship between artists, cultural workers and those who experience these places in their everyday lives: a process that is often critical and at times demanding, but one that can test the validity of projects and also call them into question.

To make the many different ways of inhabiting the city visible, with this sixteenth edition of the festival the collective intends to go off road, moving away from the idea that there is only one correct way to participate. We would like, at least temporarily, to relinquish the ambition of bringing discussions to a close, of placing a full stop at the end of every sentence

For its 16th edition, the Video Sound Art Festival is embracing a collective curatorial approach. A group of artists, researchers and curators have been invited to share processes, responsibilities and visions. Curation as a shared space, as an exercise in mutual listening.

The Festival returns this coming November 2026 to venues in the Lodi-Corvetto district of Milan, the venue for the 14th edition (2024).