XVI Edition 2026 — Preferiremmo andare fuori strada (We would rather go off-road)

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.

Edizioni Brigantino and Lucia Pescador
La cucina di Olivia
Installazione complessa

Edizioni Brigantino and Lucia Pescador present La cucina di Olivia. The project stems from a desire to create a space where Lucia Pescador’s works can interact with a new exhibition layout, one capable of welcoming the public into an intimate, domestic setting. The installation, set up next to the historic Bonvini 1909 premises, in the spaces of the former bar – which still lack a definitive purpose – unfolds across small, doorless rooms, designed by Edizioni Brigantino as places for passing through, resting and socialising. The structures engage in a dialogue with Pescador’s works. The title La cucina di Olivia echoes that of one of the artist’s works and suggests a domestic space understood not so much as a defined environment, but rather as a place of memory and relationships.
The project revisits and reinterprets an exhibition by Pescador held in 2014, which lasted four days and was conceived as an opportunity for people to come together and participate, prior to the restoration work carried out on the stationery shop. The new installation is intended as a revival of that experience. One of the venues features a screen showing A mano libera (2023), a documentary by Judith Du Pasquier dedicated to Lucia Pescador, which complements the project by offering an insight into the artist’s practice.

In the artist’s early film works, the staircase is used as a “device of power” and as a metaphor for an inexorable sociopolitical system that leaves no escape. Within this experimental body of work, which has been rediscovered and highlighted in part thanks to the “Art & Experimental Film” project of the Home Movies Foundation, Eventi represents the culmination and the most explicitly political chapter of the cycle. Returning to the idea of the infinitely looped event that was already at the heart of the artist’s first film, Silent Invasion, in Eventi she replaces the anonymous staircases of his previous work with the grand staircase of the Milan Palace of Justice. Along its steps, Berardinone makes a black sphere bounce, evoking a ball and chain, shifting the focus from the indeterminate space of his earlier works to the public and monumental setting of the judicial institution. Amid the political fervor of 1970s Italy, the work explicitly reveals the nature of the staircase as both a stage and a hierarchy of state power, institutional and social, which deprives bodies of effective freedom of movement.

Spoken Panorama is a discourse mapping project between performance and installation. Throughout the festival, Cem will record the talks of the public program and produce a semantic map of each discussion. Using software he developed, each discussion is broken into short statements and mapped in a 1024-dimensional semantic space. Reading the statements across these dimensions, the program draws connections between meanings rather than just words, revealing patterns in the conversation that are otherwise hard to locate. The maps will be printed as a series of posters and exhibited at Fondazione Galleria Milano as the festival unfolds.
On the last day, Cem A., together with anthropologists Rita Duina and Tommaso Santagostino, will reflect on the maps and the discourse produced during the festival.

During the festival, the Fondazione Milano exhibition hall is transformed into a movie theater hosting a screening program and a public program.

CNAP – Centre national des arts plastiques
Among the films in the program is a selection of works from the collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap) in Paris—a French ministerial collection established during the French Revolution—based on research conducted by curator Laura Lamonea in 2023.

The first project in the Living Architectures series, Koolhaas Houselife portrays one of the masterpieces of contemporary architecture. The video work chronicles a visit to the Maison de Bordeaux, also known as ‘Villa Lemoine’, designed in 1998 in Bouliac by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas for Jean-François Lemoine. The film allows the viewer to gain an intimate insight into the daily life of the house through the stories and everyday tasks of Guadalupe Acedo, the housekeeper, and the other people who look after the building.

Party on the CAPS takes place in a world transformed by biotechnological progress and teleportation, which has become the new means of transportation. A crocodile named Fiona recounts life on CAPS, an island located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where refugees and immigrants who have crossed seas and borders in a manner deemed “illegal” are detained by the state.

The work was created during the artist’s residency in Tetouan (Morocco), the former capital of the Spanish protectorate. The artist stages himself on the rooftops of the medina of Tétouan. The temporary nature of the medina, inherent in its urban layout, also influences the multiplicity of forms and narratives that structure it. Colomer offers a reflection on the limits and uses of a space governed by unwritten laws.

Deleuze Monument documents the project created by Thomas Hirschhorn in the Cité Champfleury neighborhood of Avignon, dedicated to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Through the construction of a temporary monument and the direct involvement of residents, the video reflects on public space and community participation. The monument becomes a relational device, capable of fostering dialogue, sharing, and the collective production of meaning.

125 hectares is the area of land that has been illegally occupied since 1983 by a farmers’ collective in Morne-Rouge, in northern Martinique. Véronique Montjean, a founding member of the collective, recounts the history of the occupation, which began as a response to real estate development projects that would have reduced the island’s arable land. The collective promotes subsistence farming based on biodiversity through the rotation of local crops, opposing the banana monoculture imposed by France, which has led to the pollution of soil and rivers due to the use of carcinogenic insecticides.

Le Park is a slow stroll through an abandoned amusement park in the heart of Casablanca (Morocco). The film focuses on the young people who frequent this place. Randa Maroufi’s camera captures, by surprise, groups of young people engaged in various activities, their movements seeming frozen in time.

The film is an experimental documentary set on the outskirts of a nature reserve in Johannesburg. It depicts the preparations for a people’s tribunal in which traditional healers, activists and lawyers come together to discuss indigenous knowledge and bioprospecting. The pharmaceutical industry has come to regard traditional medicine as a source for identifying new bioactive compounds that can be used in the development of synthetic drugs. The film’s protagonists take on different roles, whilst the ghosts of colonial explorers, botanists and judges observe the debates.

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L’Assedio explores the wild, collective, and transgressive ritual that draws over 200,000 spectators each year to the fields surrounding the Mugello Circuit during the Italian MotoGP Grand Prix. The film examines the tension between the freedom of breaking the rules and the limits imposed by the high barriers that surround the circuit.

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The documentary, filmed at Milan Central Station, uses this building as an example to demonstrate that in the contemporary urban environment, there is almost never a relationship between space and its use, highlighting the “disconnect” between architecture and vital human dynamics.

The video work is a metaphorical critique of Milan’s urban planning stagnation in the late 1970s. La Pietra features street objects and elements—bollards, posts, and chains—as symbols of a city that fails to break out of its own limitations and does not produce significant urban projects.

“To live is to feel at home wherever you are” is the phrase with which La Pietra begins the work. Through an anthological and provocative analysis, the artist decodes the suburbs and self-managed spaces (such as urban gardens), denouncing the city’s transformation into an “open-air restaurant” where commerce and tourism take away space from free collective life.

Produced for the 15th Milan Triennale, the film was shot inside the Triennale building, which—when empty—conveys the tension and anticipation felt by an artist facing his “big break,” finally called upon to express himself through a major exhibition in an institutional setting.

The film was created using a sequence of images of La Pietra’s face from 1938 to 1974, continuously juxtaposed with the image from that moment (1974). Through this sequence, one gets the impression that for thirty-six years, La Pietra had been frantically and slowly attempting to achieve a “final model” (his face in 1974).

The film explores the difficulties the artist encounters whenever he ventures beyond an established system. This concept is represented through the creation and use of an instrument (Il Commutatore, 1970) that allows him, in successive stages, to transcend the physicality of the urban environment and project himself toward the “void.”

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The film stems from a reflection on the legacy of the Cold War on Asian diaspora communities in the West, while also exploring the artists’ personal relationship with Berlin’s Vietnamese community—composed of two groups of people who arrived from a divided country to a divided country, and thus particularly symbolic of this legacy. By portraying their experience as Italian adoptive parents of a daughter and a son born in Vietnam, the artists explore the intersection of belonging, kinship, history, memory, and identity politics. The film documents a performance in an urban setting: traveling on a small boat, the artists and their family spend an intimate day in a public space, navigating Berlin’s city traffic in search of an imaginary place where the lives of those who have been divided by history might ideally come together.

Tra le Righe, (nasce) is a site-specific video installation comprising four screens arranged in sequence, side by side, positioned at the centre of two brackets. The video presents three different contexts, linked by black rubber boots – a material the artist has been working with for several years. In the darkness, everything seems to float. Through a play of reflections, the boots emerge on the screen or are worn by swimming figures, alternating with close-ups of a rubber surface that seems to harbour or generate a new form of life. The work stems from the experience of the swimming pool, traditionally marked by lanes – lines that evoke both writing and legibility as well as the movement and direction of the bodies passing through them. The artist constructs an intermediate space in which the images evoke origin, care, growth and that which is not yet present, creating a tension between what takes shape between the lines – the imagined and the possible – and the physical body.

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Surplace Radio is a performance that takes the form of a radio programme: from a temporary studio, Michele Di Stefano takes on the role of presenter and presents a programme of new releases and ethnomusical imagery, based on his album L’altro Hotel. The work draws on a vast collection of voice memos recorded by the artist whilst travelling around the world. Localised sounds, environmental fragments and moments of personal experience are reworked into pieces of ‘situated’ music.
In keeping with the conventions of music journalism, Di Stefano introduces unlikely artists and tracks; he recounts their origins, recording techniques and anecdotes through reconstructions that are as plausible as they are fictional. Imaginary theories such as ‘placed music’ and the ‘accanto theory’ evoke forms of non-selective listening, in which sound occurs alongside the listener, without necessarily capturing their attention. What emerges is a soundscape in which distant places, landscapes and everyday situations overlap, whilst reality and fiction become indistinguishable.