Italia Media Art Festival 2026 Announces International Video Art Selection Following Record 144 Submissions

IMAF 2026 unveils 13 selected video artists and four invited artists from across the world, with works set to premiere at Maker Faire Rome this October.

ROME, ROME, ITALY, August 19, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Thirteen video art works have been selected through the international Open Call, alongside four invited artists, for the Video Art section of the third edition of the Italia Media Art Festival (IMAF), the international platform dedicated to media art promoted by the “Piccola Venezia” APS Association in collaboration with Rome Art Week (RAW). In 2026, Enel supports the Open Call dedicated to Video Art & Performance, while Snam supports the Open Call for Video Installations.

This year, the festival received 144 submissions: 113 for Video Art & Performance and 31 for Video Installations, the highest number recorded by IMAF to date. The selection brings together Italian and international artists working across a wide range of languages and techniques, from pixel art and video poetry to generative artificial intelligence, audiovisual experimentation and dreamlike narratives. The list of works selected for the Video Art section is already available on the festival’s official website, while the selected performers and video installations will be announced on August 25.

Connecting such diverse artistic practices, languages and backgrounds is the curatorial theme chosen by Artistic Director Marinellys Tremamunno: “The Energy That Transforms: Human and Spiritual Strength Turned into Action for the Future.” Tremamunno curated the selection together with Jimmy Yánez, IMAF Artistic Director for Latin America, identifying the works that most originally interpret the theme of the 2026 edition.

“What does it mean to have energy today? Not only in terms of resources and infrastructure, but as a force capable of guiding choices, generating responsibility and making change possible,” Tremamunno explains.

It is a reflection that runs throughout the entire selection, connecting the human and spiritual dimensions with technological innovation and responsibility for the future.

Geographies of Energy: The Artists of IMAF 2026

Among the five selected Italian artists, Laura D’Agate — known artistically as uta dag, from Catania — presents “Time and Space,” a surreal and autobiographical journey created through collage, in which characters age and transform across marine and terrestrial worlds, embodying the different seasons of life. An original soundtrack by Tazio Iacobacci heightens the work’s dreamlike sense of estrangement.

Giorgio Gerardi (Venice) presents “Tree,” a visual and sonic investigation into the intersection of perception, technology and everyday objects.

Filippo Prestinari (Milan) presents “Vis Viva,” a film that draws on Leibniz’s concept of living force to imagine the simultaneous disappearance of all human beings. What would remain? Traces, processes already set in motion and infrastructures of violence that, without human will to sustain them, become emptied of meaning.

Ylenia Raviola (Milan) presents “Veemente,” a reflection on energy as a force that astonishes and transforms, originating from a spontaneously written phrase that becomes form.

Completing the Italian selection is Michela Sbrana (Pisa) with “Sacrificio,” a dreamlike narrative exploring spiritual energy as a force of rebirth, in which real images and generative artificial intelligence merge with a soundtrack composed and performed on piano by the artist herself.

The global scope of the theme emerges most clearly in the international section.

Joseph Ayerle (Geneva), named by MIT among the pioneers of AI-based art, presents “1058 MHz. Basel Club Edit,” a high-frequency meditation in which algorithmic aesthetics and physical embodiment converge in a destabilizing perceptual flow, conceived for Swiss EDM clubs.

Johan Barbosa — known as Trippingcats, from Bogotá — presents “Jungle Souls,” portraying the jungle as a living spiritual body populated by jaguars, birds and ancestral symbols that embody energy in transformation. Nature is presented not as landscape, but as a conscious subject.

Andre Figueroa (Rome, of Bolivian origin) presents “El Salar,” the story of a young flamingo left behind during migration who searches for an ancient god capable of teaching him to fly, in a pixel-art animation inspired by Andean folklore.

Anastasia Pavlova (St. Petersburg) presents “From One Point,” in which a point of light born within a prehistoric figure transforms seamlessly into Gothic architecture, painting, music and dance, suggesting that art always grows from the same inner source.

Kenneth Russo (Girona) presents “Doubt,” a video essay on the fragility of critical thinking in a world saturated with screens. Repeated visual patterns become metaphors for media systems that promise freedom while reproducing rituals of control.

Negar Samadikia (Karaj, Iran) presents “Time,” a space suspended between belonging and uprooting, built through sensory editing that explores the psychology of migration through reflections, thresholds and rays of sunlight.

Angelina Voskopoulou (Athens) presents “I Soli che Bruciano,” a fragmented record of memory constructed around an angel without a sky, a figure of transition and loss suspended between earth and absence.

Completing the international selection is Nan Zhang (Beijing) with “Hyperdimensional Symbiote,” a digital image born as a moving cell and transformed into a physical installation of luminous spheres and tentacles evoking nodes of consciousness and neural connections between living beings.

Four Invited Artists Complete the Program

Alongside the competitive selection, four invited artists complete the program.

Marco Caridad (Maracaibo) presents “Noche de San Juan,” a video performance in which the ritual gesture of walking backwards into the sea — recalling the Caribbean tradition of St. John’s Night — becomes a symbolic act of liberation from injustice.

Bruno Cerboni (Rome) presents “Lux Humana,” a visual poem in three movements — ORIGO, TRANSMUTATIO, ACTIO — generated entirely through artificial intelligence in the METAMORPHOSIS DÉCO language, where energy originates in people before it reaches power plants.

Victoria Thomen (Rome) presents “Mons Movens,” in which the mountain becomes a mirror of the human being: both appear motionless while concealing a process of continuous transformation.

The duo GlitchA/V Project — Maurizio Zoccola and Vincenzo Ascione, Naples — presents “Emergent Thoughts,” in which female faces merge and mutate as dark branching forms spread like neural structures, accompanied by a musical composition for acoustic ensemble and an electronic layer generated in Pure Data.

The First Major Public Event: Maker Faire Rome

The first major event open to the public has already been confirmed: October 23, 24 and 25, 2026, at the Gazometro Ostiense in Rome, as part of Maker Faire Rome – The European Edition and Rome Art Week (RAW).

All selected works will be screened in a dedicated area within the event. The festival will also feature an interactive space devoted to video installations, following the format that attracted thousands of visitors — including technology professionals, artists and the general public — during the 2024 and 2025 editions.

Maker Faire Rome is today one of Europe’s major innovation events. Bringing IMAF into this context means placing a reflection on energy — artistic, spiritual and technological — at the heart of a community that works with that energy every day.

The third edition is shaping up to be the richest program in the festival’s history, with further details to be announced gradually. A première of the selected works is also planned, with the venue and date to be announced shortly.

Then, in November, IMAF will introduce something unprecedented: for the first time in its history, the festival will present a major international exhibition dedicated to Media Art. The venue, participating artists and full program will be announced in the coming weeks.

Perhaps the most telling figure of this third edition is the number of submissions received. The volume of entries required the jury to extend its evaluation process and made it necessary to stagger the announcements.

At a time when shrinking public funding for culture is forcing many festivals to scale back their ambitions, the Italia Media Art Festival is moving in the opposite direction, expanding its scope. And the 144 submissions received suggest that energy is more than this year’s curatorial proposition: it touches on a question already present in the work and research of many contemporary artists.

SAVE THE DATES
August 25, 2026: Announcement of the selected Video Installation and Performance artists.
Première of the selected works: Venue and date to be announced.
October 23–25: Maker Faire Rome – The European Edition, Gazometro Ostiense, Rome — full screening of the selected video art works.
November 2026: Major International Media Art Exhibition — venue and program to be announced.

Information: www.italiamediaartfestival.it
Instagram: @italiamediaartfestival

Marinellys Tremamunno
ITALIA MEDIA ART FESTIVAL
info@italiamediaartfestival.it
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