Terrapolis

Terrapolis is an art project conceived and promoted by the curatorial collective Parsec, which since 2021 has been exploring the relationships between contemporary art, ecology and collective practices, investigating the ways in which artistic practice can intervene in a wide range of ecological contexts. Terrapolis, named after a fictional equation cited by Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, began in Bologna as a festival of performance and moving image, and over the years evolved into a diffuse and participatory programme, able to move through urban landscapes and green areas, weaving alliances between artists, collectives, communities and territories.

From its first edition, Terrapolis has been conceived as an open, rhizomatic space where different languages and practices intertwine. In 2022, the second edition moved to Tenuta Bene in the Bolognese hills, a less anthropized and more isolated setting than the previous year; this made it possible to explore the relationship between art and nature in a different way through the concept of sympoiesis, or “making worlds together.” The third edition, in 2023, took a twofold form: a summer preview at Tenuta Bene and a festival day in the Parco di Villa Angeletti, in Bologna. Titled Archaeologies of the Future, the edition investigated the role of utopian imagination in the age of the planetary climate crisis. In 2024, with everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart, Terrapolis became an expanded programme, spread between May and September across several green areas of the city of Bologna. In 2025, with the fifth edition Transversal Worlds, Posthuman Futures, Terrapolis consolidated itself as a diffuse cultural programme and platform running from May to December 2025, through events co-designed with local organisations, artist residencies, an open-air cinema programme, an independent publishing festival and, as its central moment, the Transversal Ecologies Festival, hosted for the first time outside the city limits of Bologna, in Castiglione dei Pepoli. This latest edition draws on the theory of posthuman convergence proposed by feminist philosophers such as Rosi Braidotti, to interrogate the ongoing transformations between technological revolution and ecological collapse. Transversality becomes a political and methodological principle, capable of connecting heterogeneous subjectivities, hybrid practices, relational ethics and forms of shared resistance.

In 2026, Terrapolis reached its sixth edition with Transversal Ecologies Festival, in Castiglione dei Pepoli, in the Bolognese Apennines. Over the course of three days, the festival brought together performative, sonic, and collaborative practices dedicated to contemporary ecological thought.

Terrapolis adopts this image as a framework for reflecting on the interdependencies between life forms, technologies, materials, and practices, fostering collective processes of learning, experimentation, and shared knowledge production. Through walks, workshops, communal meals, performances, live acts and DJ sets, public talks, and artistic presentations, the festival weaves together themes such as ecological regeneration, speculative design, cultural memory, and the relationships between bodies, care, and technology. The 2026 edition also hosted the outcomes of the European project Creative Landscapes, supported by the European Union and developed in collaboration with the Lithuanian association Miško uostas, reaffirming Terrapolis as a meeting space for artistic practices, ecologies, and communities.

Over the past six years, Terrapolis has built a living archive of situated artistic practices, continuously experimenting with new formats and co-creative processes involving local residents.