Andy Barrt, The Snow Flower of the North, sculptural performance. CYFEST 17, CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo, Venice, Italy, 2026. Photograph: Anton Khlabov.
Nature, human connections, landscapes: these are some of the key words running through the present, at a time of profound technological transformation and growing environmental urgency. Artists explore these themes not simply as subjects to represent, but as fields of relationships, living processes and unstable systems in which matter, perception, data and imagination are continually redefined. Light, glaciers, species of the future, experimental energies and changing landscapes find a place in the works of the artists featured in CYFEST 17 – International Media Art Festival, presented in Venice through the exhibition Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape, hosted by CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo until 31 August 2026.
Andy Barrt, Ice Man, sculpture, 2025. CYFEST 17, CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo, Venice, Italy, 2026. Photograph: Anton Khlabov.
The title evokes the philosophical concept of Natura Naturans: nature understood not as a completed form, but as a generative force, an active principle, a process of continual becoming. In this spirit, media art does more than observe the landscape or translate nature into an image: it approaches nature through a narrative, perceptual and experimental dimension, where technology and sensitivity become tools for making visible the invisible forces that traverse the world. Now in its seventeenth edition, CYFEST confirms its position as one of the longest-running international festivals devoted to media art. Conceived by CYLAND MediaArtLab and organised by CYLAND Foundation, the festival brings together artists, curators, engineers, programmers and researchers working with time-based installations, sound, video art, algorithmic compositions and hybrid practices. Following its launch in Thessaloniki at the end of 2025, the programme now arrives in Venice with exhibitions, performances, screenings and discussions.
The Venice exhibition brings works from the Frants Collection into dialogue with contemporary media art research, tracing a continuity between the twentieth-century avant-garde and artistic practices of the present. While modernism sought to move beyond the straightforward representation of the visible to investigate movement, light, colour and structure, today’s artists work with automation, kinetics, atmospheric systems and digital programming, opening up new spaces of perception.
Mathieu Zurstrassen, 92Lb4, kinetic sculpture, 2025. CYFEST 17, CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo, Venice, Italy, 2026. Photograph: Anton Khlabov.
In this expanded ecosystem, technology appears not simply as a tool added to the artwork, but as a sensitive environment in which the work itself takes shape, evolves and opens itself to contingency. Nature thus becomes not only a theme, but a method: a grammar of change, transformation and vulnerability. Among the works on display, the automated kinetic drawings of Anna Frants explore the relationship between light and time, reactivating humanity’s age-old desire to capture movement through light. Jaanika Peerna evokes the atmospheric memory of glaciers, transforming their fragility into a poetic and environmental reflection. Tuula Närhinen imagines possible hybrid bird species capable of feeding on plastic waste, constructing a natural fiction that questions the relationship between the urban landscape, ecological transformation and the future of species.
Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov, Victory over the Sun, media installation, 2023. CYFEST 17, CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo, Venice, Italy, 2026. Photograph: Anton Khlabov.
Mariateresa Sartori entrusts the gesture of drawing to the wind, using an anemometer capable of producing circular forms suspended between mechanical objectivity and almost imperceptible human intervention. The research of Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov draws on the experimental energy of the avant-garde, translating its dynamism into a contemporary kinetic language. The collective AES+F, meanwhile, investigates corporeality, depression and altered perception through digital aesthetics suspended between a fairy-tale dimension and unease.
On 8 May, at the opening at CREA, the festival presented a live performance by Mexican artist Hugo Solis, accompanied by a participatory action by Jaanika Peerna in which a sculpted piece of ice became a totemic emblem of strength, beauty and environmental fragility. The audience was invited to take part in an ephemeral balance between creation and dissolution: a symbolic gesture that gives perceptible form to the precariousness of our relationship with the natural world.
Anna Frants, To Make a Long Story Short, from the series Simple Joys, 2024, installation. CYFEST 16, HayArt Centre, Yerevan, Armenia, 2024. Photograph: Ann Prilutckaia.
On 9 May, at the Auditorium Santa Margherita, the video programme What’s in a Story?, devised by curator Barbara London, further expanded the discussion, bringing together artists of different generations and geographical backgrounds around the narrative potential of contemporary technologies. From the camera to software, the selected works explored the unstable distance between lived experience and storytelling, between identity, imagination and the ability to generate change.
With Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape, CYFEST 17 thus offers a broad and layered reflection on the relationship between human beings, nature and landscape in an age of advanced technologies. Neither a naive celebration of progress nor a nostalgic vision of nature, it is a poetic and critical exploration of the forces shaping the present: light, matter, time, memory, vulnerability and transformation.
USEFUL INFORMATION
CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo, Giudecca 211/B, Venice
Tuesday–Saturday: 11:00–18:00
Sunday: 11:00–17:00
Monday: closed
www.cyfest.art/cyfest-17-venice
English translation of the original Italian article.