Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo, the artist duo who direct Ibrida, the festival that brings the most radical and influential forms of multidisciplinary artistic research to Forlì every year, talk about the 2025 edition. The event, for this edition dedicated to the theme of Multitude, will take place from 25 to 28 September 2025 in the evocative spaces of the Fabrica delle Candele with video art, performance art, installations, conferences, workshops and music, and a special guest: American artist Gary Hill, pioneer of video art, awarded with the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale A major international exhibition at the Zoli Foundation dedicated to Digital Anatomies precedes the festival as a prologue. Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo discuss all the work and choices that have led them to this tenth edition in the spirit of bridging the past and the future. The plurality of voices in contemporary artistic production is strengthened every year in an ever-expanding network.
Elena Giulia Rossi: Over the past ten years, Ibrida Festival has continually grown and evolved, expanding in both the number and diversity of its events and works. This year, to celebrate its tenth edition, the projection toward the future is also accompanied by a retrospective look at the body of works presented over time, reinterpreted as “a great organism in the making”. How did you give shape to this perspective?
Francesca Leoni e Davide Mastrangelo: We chose to regard our archive not as a collection of static memories, but as a living material, able to dialogue with the present and pointing toward new directions. Looking back over ten years of works, it’s clear how video art and performance art have responded to social, political, and technological change. In this sense, the archive becomes a true “organism in the making”, breathing with the transformations of the world – just as is happening in major international museums which, in recent years, have begun to consider media art not only as a document, but as a living and necessary presence to represent the present.
The theme of this edition is “Multitude”. In relation to the plurality of languages, how important is it today for you to recognize – and have recognized – the specificity of video art?
Video art today moves within a complex space: on the one hand, the language of video has become daily, pervasive, and integral to our way of communicating; on the other, it risks being confused with the production of ephemeral, consumer images. For us, recognizing its specificity means emphasizing its poetic, political, and perceptual force: its ability to generate transformative experiences.
In a context of “multitude,” video is a true mother tongue of contemporaneity, but it is only through a conscious and radical use that it becomes art. Precisely because we are overwhelmed with audiovisual content, we feel the responsibility to trace clear trajectories, preventing everything from ending up in the same indistinct cauldron. Our task is to present the phenomenon to viewers as it is, while at the same time equipping them with useful tools to analyze and understand the work.
How have technology and video language changed over the past ten years?
Ten years ago, we still spoke of “digital” as a necessary frontier; today we are immersed in a visual ecosystem in which AI, augmented reality, real-time streaming and interactive languages are integral to artistic production. The video language has absorbed influences from game art, computer graphics, and generative art, creating a hybrid terrain where the artist is often simultaneously a programmer, performer, and director. Today the production system is changing exponentially: with the advent of AI, the distinction between production and post-production tends to dissolve. There is no longer an “after” in which one intervenes to edit or correct, but rather a circular process in which the work is born within a continuous flow of generation, modification, and re-elaboration. This means the creative act never concludes, but remains open, in permanent transformation. Such fluidity reflects the current trend of international contemporary art, where traditional categories are constantly being questioned.
What can we expect this year in the section dedicated to installations, inaugurated in 2022?
This year the installation section addresses a crucial theme of our time: the universe of social networks, a space in which the “Multitude” has found an amplified voice, which isn’t always harmonious. We find ourselves in an arena where words multiply until they become noise, and dialogue is often replaced by the echo of the most immediate emotions.
In this context, Max Magaldi’s Vainglory transforms space into an immersive landscape of digital devices and voices, reflecting on the compulsive need to appear. With Portable Insult Machine, Igor Imhoff stages the verbal violence of the online world, reversing roles and placing viewers before an algorithm that observes and offends them. With The Garden of Water Lilies, Sara Koppel offers instead a poetic work in augmented reality that rekindles the bond between humanity and nature. Three different perspectives that illuminate the digital multitude and its contradictions.
What considerations emerged when evaluating the works received for the open call?
We observed a strong presence of works dealing with memory and the layering of images, often intertwining family archives, historical documents, and Ai-generated materials. The artistic geography has broadened: alongside countries such as Belgium and Brazil, already attentive to this language, new scenes are emerging from Asia and Africa – a sign that it has now become global.
China distinguished itself for the quality of its works and for its use of diverse media, such as video games, to analyze and reinterpret reality. One example is A Camera and an Engine by Yuting Chen, which follows the suspended life of a young live streamer between the digital and the physical, alternating glitches and bugs with metaphors of precariousness and social anxiety. The work reflects the fragility of identity in a hypercompetitive society, where digital immersion amplifies and simultaneously fractures the lived experience.
All this confirms how video art, despite its specificity, is today a platform for intercultural dialogue and a valuable tool for reading the complexities of the present.
This year’s prologue to the Festival will be the collective “Anatomie Digitali” (Digital Anatomies). Can you tell us about this project and its five thematic areas?
Anatomie Digitali is the prologue with which we celebrate ten years of Ibrida Festival. It is not a simple retrospective, but a poetic and curatorial investigation of the audiovisual body and its metamorphoses over the past decade. Inspired by the etymology of “anatomy”, we opened our archive as an anatomist would: to look within, to decompose, to dissect. It is also a critical perspective, akin to a Foucauldian gaze, examining how power and knowledge inscribe themselves on the body.
The path crosses more than fifteen countries, weaving together global languages and aesthetics without losing its ties to the local territory, and is divided into five thematic areas, like vital organs of a body in becoming:
- Genesis, paying homage to the origins of video art and the tensions between body and technology, inaugurated by Self ( ) by Gary Hill (2016), the year the festival was born – a work that, emblematically, is in dialogue with our own journey;
- Electronic Bodies, where the body becomes a sensitive interface, fluid identity, and performative device;
- Anatomy of the Sign, dedicated to visual experimentation and animation as symbolic matter;
- Ibrida Prize, bringing together winning works capable of combining aesthetic research and expressive urgency;
- Signals, where glitches, artificial intelligence, and new visual forms transform error and digital code into poetic matter.
Thus, Anatomie Digitali takes shape as a fluid, multicentric map of contemporary aesthetics – an act of love for research and hybridization, but also a critical reflection on the phygital condition in which we live, suspended between the biological and the artificial, between presence and algorithmic translation.
There is also important news this year regarding awards and residencies…
This year, for the first time, we inaugurate an artistic residence entirely conceived and wanted by Ibrida: a step we had long dreamed of, marking a significant evolution in our relationship with the territory.
For us, residencies and awards are not mere prizes, but opportunities to build connections and leave concrete traces. Last year, for example, the winner of the Fabrica Prize visited Forlì during the festival, filming footage that will feature in their next work.
This year we take another step forward thanks to our collaboration with Atrium, a European association based in Forlì. The artist selected by Ibrida will immerse themselves in the city and create a video artwork dedicated to its dissonant architecture. The work will be premiered at the next edition of the festival and will remain in the Atrium collection, becoming a shared visual memory.
Concluding thoughts and wishes for the future.
Coming to Forlì, the public will not only find a festival, but a collective experience. We would like Ibrida to be perceived as a place where art is not just seen, but lived and shared.
After ten years, we look back at the Festival with amazement: we could never have imagined coming this far. We have gone through some difficult times and celebrated unexpected joys, and each edition has left deep traces in those who took part in it. Our hope is that this multitude will continue to grow, intertwining local experiences with international trajectories, like an ever-expanding mosaic that reflects both the changing times and the evolution of a community in transformation.
IBRIDA Festival 2025. Moltitudini, curated by Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo, Fabrica delle Candele, Forlì, 25–28 September 2025. Please visit the website for the updated programme of events.
Anatomie Digitali, curated by Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo, Fondazione Dino Zoli, 1–9–10 September 2025. The group exhibition is produced by Vertov Project and Fondazione Dino Zoli.
Artists: Gianluca Abbate, Alessandro Amaducci, Karin Andersen, Apotropia, Elena Bellantoni, Filippo Berta, Sara Bonaventura, Robert Cahen, Matteo Campulla, Rita Casdia, Carlos Casas, Georgios Cherouvim, Citron/Lunardi, Zlatko Ćosić, Martín Córdoba, Brecht De Cock, Iginio De Luca, Silvia De Gennaro, Sandrine Deumier, Michele Di Pirro, Elisabetta Di Sopra, Ilaria Di Carlo, Felix Dierich, Francesca Fini, Laura Focarazzo, Regina José Galindo, Daniele Grosso, Marcia Beatriz Granero, Gary Hill, Igor Imhoff, Salvatore Insana, Jacopo Jenna, Yoshihisa Kitamura, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Francesca Lolli, Marcantonio Lunardi, Eleonora Manca, Antonello Matarazzo, Sofia Melikova, Albert Merino, Ethann Néon, Donato Piccolo, Luis Carlos Rodriguez, Miguel Rozas, Hiroya Sakurai, Ursula San Cristobal, Guli Silberstein, Valentin Sismann, Lino Strangis, Rino Stefano Tagliafierro, Cosimo Terlizzi, Devis Venturelli, Virgilio Villoresi, Debora Vrizzi, Hernando Urrutia, Shon Kim.
images: (cover 1) Albert Merino, ‘Le Monde Sublunaire’, 2022, video frame (2) Debora Vrizzi, ‘Family Portrait’, 2012, video frame (3) Ibrida Staff 2025, © Vertov Project, photo by Andrea Bardi (4-7) GARY HILL, !SELF series, Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Lia Rumma Milano- Napoli (5) Yuting Chen, ‘A Camera and an Engine’, 2024 (6) Georgios Cherouvim, ‘Geophone’, 2016, video frame (7) Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo, © Vertov Project, photo by Andrea Bardi
