Forlì is once again becoming a Babel of stimuli and visions, thanks to the Ibrida International Festival of Intermedia Arts: the eleventh edition, with the theme Hyper Reality, is scheduled to take place from 17 to 20 September. An essential and complementary prelude to this is the intermedia group exhibition Interference, which, until 11 October, brings together the radical explorations of twelve international female artists.
“Technology does not replace presence, but amplifies it, creating experiences capable of expanding reality and its possibilities,” reflect Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo of Vertov Project, Artistic Directors of the Ibrida Festival. “Hyper Reality embodies this exploration through a programme of physical, performative and collaborative works, in which dance, live media, artificial intelligence, immersive environments, installations and audiovisual practices redefine the relationship between body, space and perception.”
“The exhibition Interference also stems from this perspective,” they add. “Interference not as an error, but as a generative force capable of forging new connections between memory, identity, imaginaries and digital ecosystems. We are not interested in pitting the real against the artificial, but in observing what emerges from their encounter.”
Some highlights.
Among the live performances, at the Fabbrica delle Candele in Forlì: Daemon by Motus, part of the project that Daniela Nicolò and Enrico Casagrande have dedicated to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; the national premiere of the audiovisual concert The Inhabitants by French musical artist Franck Vigroux; Disease by Francesco Misceo and Raoul Battilani, based on real-time interaction between dance, generative graphics, sound and light; Metanoia by Chiara Martina Halter and Oliver Walton, an interactive performance blending dance and generative artificial intelligence.
The Fabbrica delle Candele will also host a rich international selection of video art (changing every evening), chosen via an international open call and competing for the Ibrida Prize 2026. The works, from all over the world, will be divided into sections: Segnali, Kinesis, AI Video Art and Percezioni, as well as the non-competitive section Hambres que alimentan. Four immersive installations by artists from Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Suriname and Slovakia will also be on display.
Furthermore, the former Santarelli Nursery will host two talks and two workshops. Davide Mastrangelo and Francesca Leoni will present the talk Hyper Reality. Images, bodies and identities beyond the boundaries of reality, whilst Laura Gemini and Giovanni Boccia Artieri, authors of the recent essay Visual Performance. A Sociology of the Gaze between Practices and Artificial Communication, will engage in a discussion with Michele Pascarella, an arts and culture communicator. Mateusz Miroslaw will lead the workshop on video creation using artificial intelligence, Generative Analogue, whilst Igor Imhoff will lead the workshop on AI for real-time performance, New Performative Workflows.
At the end of the Festival, three Ibrida Awards will be presented: International Video Art, Italian Video Art and AI Video Art. The twelve artists featured in the intermedia group exhibition Interference, held at the Dino Zoli Foundation in Forlì, are Chiara Passa, Rä di Martino, Rebecca Merlic, Anaisa Franco, Elena Bellantoni, Francesca Grilli, Giuliana Cunéaz, Debora Hirsch, Kika Nicolela, Aline Motta, Biarritzzz and Özge Samancı. Curated by Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo.
(from the press release)
Ibrida Festival, Forlì, 17–20 September 2026.
Visit the website here for tickets and the updated programme of events
Interference. The image is never just an image, curated by Vertov Project (Francesca Leoni, Davide Mastrangelo)
Dino Zoli Foundation, Forlì, 1 September – 11 October 2026 (free admission)
images: Ibrida Festival 2026, press conference, ph: George Mate (2) Cristian Rizzuti and Julián Álvarez, «Amnesia», 2021-2026 (3) Mateusz Miroslaw, Generative Analogue Workshop, Ibrida Festival 2026 (4) Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo
