Italian
At the exact moment when Venice returns to being the symbolic and real center of global art, just a few days before the opening of the 61st Biennale, a project forcefully emerges that rejects the very idea of institutional framing to become an immersive, political, and sensory experience. “We Travel To Know Our Own Geography,” conceived and curated by Kuboraum, reaches its third edition, confirming itself as one of the most insightful interventions in rethinking the role of the body, sound, and identity in the contemporary.
VENICE. Hosted in the spaces of the Pier Fortunato Calvi school, in the Castello district, and developed in collaboration with the School for Curatorial Studies Venice, the festival is part of the public program of the exhibition One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin, but radically expands its theoretical premises. Here, the journey is not merely a geographical crossing, but a practice of exposure to otherness, a critical device capable of challenging the rigidity of contemporary identities. The manifesto of Kuboraum, from which the project takes shape, invites us to transcend the boundaries of the epidermis to construct our own geography, understood as an unstable, stratified territory in continuous negotiation.
In a cultural present dominated by hypermediation, standardization, and polarization, the festival takes a clear stance: to defend complexity. Where society tends to simplify, classify, and reduce subjectivities to readable and consumable categories, We Travel To Know Our Own Geography opposes an aesthetics of ambiguity and contamination. The works cannot be inscribed in defined genres, but move between performance, music, visual arts, and rituality, creating spaces where the boundary between disciplines dissolves. This hybridization is not a formal whim, but a political stance: rejecting hierarchies also means rejecting the power structures that support them.
Within this framework, the choice of Venice takes on an almost paradigmatic value. A city built on water and instability, historically a crossroads of exchanges between East and West, the lagoon embodies an identity that is never fixed, always in transformation. Its history of cultural contaminations resonates deeply with Kuboraum’s vision: where homogenization produces impoverishment, difference becomes a condition of richness. Venice is therefore not just a simple backdrop, but a narrative device, a space that amplifies and reflects the tensions of the festival.
The beating heart of the 2026 edition is entrusted to the collective ASIANDOPEBOYS, founded by the artist Tianzhuo Chen, a key figure in redefining the language of contemporary performance through the intertwining of club culture, spiritual iconographies, and rituals. The collective presents itself as a mutating organism, where identities, symbols, and temporalities are never stable but continuously renegotiated. In Venice, in collaboration with Indonesian choreographer Siko Setyanto, they bring Moyang 先祖 & Seaman 漁師, a project that develops around Ocean Cage, a scenic structure that is at once a stage, installation, and conceptual architecture of the entire festival.
Inspired by Nō theater and ancestral oceanic mythologies, Ocean Cage is configured as a ritual space where linear time is suspended. Setyanto’s meditative movements, infused with states of trance and improvisation, engage in dialogue with the dense and layered soundscape of the involved musicians, generating an experience that is both corporeal and spiritual. The work is not limited to being observed: it invites one to be traversed, challenging the separation between performer and spectator.
This tension between memory and presence also permeates the work of Filipino artist Joshua Serafin, who presents Relics: An Eye Once Blind alongside Görkem Şen and Pierre Bayet. The project, the first chapter of a broader research on lost genealogies, starts from the artist’s personal history to question wider issues related to colonial memory, migration, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Through the body, understood as a living archive, Serafin attempts to reactivate what has been forgotten or removed, constructing a language that intertwines rituality, speculative cosmologies, and queer politics.
The ritual and transformative dimension emerges strongly in De Brujas y Fantasmas, signed by Kianí del Valle together with producer Ziúr. Here, the figure of the witch is removed from stereotypes to become an archive of ancestral knowledge and a healing device. Traversing imaginaries that range from Latin America to Europe, the performance constructs a space where the visible and invisible intertwine, shaping an ambivalent presence, both dark and generative.
The sound, in the festival, does not accompany but constructs the space. This is clearly perceived in McArthur, a live project by FRANKIE (Franziska Aigner) and Kelman Duran, born from a chance meeting in a Berlin church and developed as a shared exploration between voice, atmosphere, and improvisation. The performance moves between intimacy and tension, allowing a suspended dimension to emerge, never fully resolved, in which sound becomes emotional matter.
This reflection on identity and belonging is linked to Home, a work by Ziúr and Sandi Home, featuring Martina Bertoni and Sara Persico. Here, the concept of “home” is deconstructed and reconstructed through a tapestry of voices, electronics, and live instruments, revealing itself as an unstable construction, continuously redefined by individual and collective experiences.
In Emiliano Maggi’s work, Estasy Live, this instability translates into a visual and performative imagery where human and animal bodies merge, giving rise to ambiguous figures, suspended between fairy tale and the uncanny. The presence of the choir amplifies the ritual dimension, transforming the performance into an almost liturgical experience, where the boundary between aesthetics and spirituality becomes thinner.
Completing the program, the sound trajectories of Romain Azzaro and Cosimo Damiano traverse fluid musical territories, where genres and temporalities overlap. From Azzaro’s cinematic guitar to Damiano’s electronic architectures, a common quest emerges: to build soundscapes capable of activating the unconscious and imagining other possibilities, “lost futures” that resonate again in the present.
Free and open to the public by reservation, the festival is not only an event but also a platform for meeting and production, closely connected to Kuboraum Editions, where many of the works find a continuation in physical form. In this sense, We Travel To Know Our Own Geography does not end in the four Venetian days, but extends over time, continuing to generate connections, dialogues, and possibilities.
In an era that tends to reduce complexity to simplified and consumable languages, Kuboraum builds a space of resistance. Here, contradiction is not a mistake, but a resource; ambiguity is not a limit, but an opening. And Venice, once again, proves to be the ideal place to embrace this tension: a city that, for centuries, has existed precisely in the continuous crossing of identities, cultures, and imaginaries.
