Date / Time
9 May–31 August 2026
11:00–18:00
Venue
CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo, Sestiere Dorsoduro 211/B, Venice.
CYFEST, one of the longest-running international festivals devoted to media art, returns to Venice. For its seventeenth edition, it chooses to investigate one of the most urgent issues of the present: the relationship between human beings, nature and landscape. Following its launch in Thessaloniki at the end of 2025, the festival arrives at CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo on Giudecca with Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape, an exhibition that takes the form of an ecosystem rather than a display, open until 31 August 2026.
The title evokes the philosophical concept of natura naturans: nature not as an object, but as a generative force, a continuous process of transformation. From this perspective, art too ceases to be representation and becomes an active device, a field in which time, light and matter emerge. The exhibition brings works from the Frants Collection into dialogue with contemporary practices, tracing a line through the twentieth century to the latest experiments, where construction takes precedence over representation and form becomes dynamic, unstable and open. While the historical avant-garde had already abandoned the imitation of reality to engage with its internal logic, this shift became radicalised in the unofficial art of postwar Leningrad: the artwork as an autonomous system founded on process and perception. Today, the exhibiting artists continue this trajectory through different tools — automation, kinetics, atmospheric systems and digital programming — redefining the relationship between technology and sensitivity. Technologies are no longer a means, but the very place where the work takes shape: unstable, contingent and constantly changing.
Among the works on display, Anna Frants’s automated kinetic drawings investigate the relationship between light and time, evoking an ancient tension — the desire to capture movement — that runs through the history of the image, from cave paintings to digital animation. Jaanika Peerna, meanwhile, constructs a fragile, atmospheric imaginary in which glaciers become memory and paradox: objects to love, but with the distance needed to avoid accelerating their disappearance.
The relationship between the natural and the artificial also runs through the work of Tuula Närhinen, who imagines hybrid bird species capable of feeding on plastic, turning fiction into a critical tool for reflecting on the mutation of ecosystems. Mariateresa Sartori, with her anemometer exposed to the wind, produces circular drawings suspended between mechanical recording and imperceptible gesture, while the duo Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov reinterprets the energy of the avant-garde in contemporary terms through kinetic installations.
There is also a more explicitly immersive and unsettling dimension, as in the work of the collective AES+F, which explores corporeality and altered perception through digital aesthetics suspended between the fairy-tale and the uncanny.
Alongside the exhibition, CYFEST 17 activates a programme of performances, screenings and discussions that amplifies its themes. On 8 May, at the opening, Hugo Solis’s sound intervention enters into dialogue with Jaanika Peerna’s participatory performance, which uses a block of ice as a symbolic element, inviting the audience to confront the tension between creation and dissolution.
The following day, at the Auditorium Santa Margherita, the video programme What’s in a Story?, curated by Barbara London, brings together artists of different generations and backgrounds to investigate the narrative possibilities of contemporary technologies, between image, storytelling and the construction of identity. The day concludes with the presentation of the volume Afterwards. Art in the Time of Change, an opportunity to discuss the role of art in a context shaped by technological acceleration and social transformation. In this setting, CYFEST 17 confirms its position not only as an exhibition platform, but as a space for critical reflection, where art, science and technology intertwine to question an unstable present — and perhaps to imagine new forms of relationship with what we call nature.
English translation of the original Italian event article.