Seven Visions Transforming Media Art: IMAF 2026 Reveals Its Installation Selection

OPEN CALL RESULTS — The seven video installations selected from 31 proposals submitted through the Snam-supported Open Call

ROME, ROME, ITALY, August 26, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Seven proposals out of thirty-one. This is the selection ratio for the Video Installations section of the third edition of the Italia Media Art Festival: 31 projects were submitted through the Open Call supported by Snam, and seven were selected for the exhibition.

An acceptance rate of 22 percent that, translated into the language of art, says a great deal both about the overall quality of the submissions and the rigor with which the jury approached the selection. At a time when festivals often tend to include rather than exclude, IMAF has chosen the opposite direction: to select, refine and build a coherent curatorial discourse.

The section is curated by two figures whose complementary perspectives are far from accidental.

Marinellys Tremamunno, an Italian-Venezuelan professional journalist accredited to the Holy See, communications expert and correspondent for international media outlets including Diario Las Américas in the United States and Imagen TV in Mexico, is the founder and driving force behind the Italia Media Art Festival.

Since founding the festival in 2024, she has transformed it into an internationally recognized platform, capable of welcoming artists from every continent and building relationships with institutions such as the European Cultural Foundation, Maker Faire Rome and Rome Art Week.

Her vision is that of a journalist able to recognize cultural phenomena before they become self-evident: the festival does not simply follow trends, but seeks to anticipate them in order to create a space for ethical reflection through artistic production using new technologies.

Digital Art

Mariia Plekhova brings to the project the perspective of someone who inhabits digital art from within. An artist of Russian origin working with abstract and immersive practices, an innovator in the field of art-tech and a TEDx speaker, she develops her work across Italy, Portugal, Russia, Finland, Malaysia, Singapore and Cyprus.

Her international career includes more than twenty exhibitions, works held in private collections alongside Picasso, Modigliani and Chagall, a collective virtual reality installation presented at the World Economic Forum 2026 through the Basel Investor Forum, and an invitation to Art Basel 2026 to present her virtual reality installation.

Founder of Cyprus Art Week — an international cultural and ecological festival developed with the support of the Cypriot government and involving more than one hundred artists — Plekhova is also an established presence within the IMAF ecosystem: she has received two awards from the festival, while her AI-generated short film “Creatore” was presented in the context of the 60th Venice Biennale.

In this edition, she serves both as curator and exhibiting artist with her immersive installation “The Church of Latent Space”: a sanctuary of imagination in which VR headsets, 3D-printed angels and figures suspended between matter and the virtual world present artificial intelligence’s “latent space” as a place where relationships between people, ideas and technologies become a transformative force.

The Installations

The seven selected installations explore a broad but clearly defined thematic spectrum inspired by this year’s curatorial theme:

“The Energy That Transforms: Human and Spiritual Strength Turned into Action for the Future.”

Matteo Campulla (Milan), with “Until the Land Stopped Answering,” transforms landscapes contaminated by electronic waste into unstable visual fields, while a noise-guitar composition accompanies the recursive degradation of the image: technological progress becomes a silent redistribution of sacrifice.

Annamirka Criscuolo (Minturno) presents “What Is (Not) an Emotion”: virtual reality and real-time biometric monitoring in which the participant’s heart rate becomes visible to an external audience, opening a fracture between the experienced body and the represented body.

Sandrine Deumier (Toulouse), with “Electrical-darkness,” proposes an interactive fiction in which the body becomes an interface: there are no instructions, only perception and attention as tools for orientation within a hypersensitive metaverse.

Edoardo Faglia (Brescia) presents “La Zattera”: human silhouettes outlined by LEDs pulsing the Morse code for SOS — a call for collective responsibility in the face of environmental emergencies, translated into luminous form.

Claudio Marani (Manziana) presents “Prabhā Aura”: a Kinect transforms the visitor’s silhouette into a fluid luminous halo, combining the Sanskrit term for radiant light with the Latin word aura in a participatory experience that makes the body’s energy visible.

Christelle Mas (Oulu), with “Sensitive Matter Systems,” converts ocean microscopy data into an immersive installation: speculative organisms emerge from projections while light moves across surfaces like oxygen circulating through a body.

Completing the selection is Saul Saguatti (Bologna) with “Macchine Biologiche”: charcoal animation, projections and air-driven surfaces generate impossible organisms and mechanisms, proposing an ecological vision of energy suspended between matter, the unconscious and technology.

Four invited artists complete the exhibition:

Maria Korporal (Berlin) with “Breathearth”;
Paula Marcondes (São Paulo) with “Chess Between Colonies”;
Iuliia Nagibneva (Rome) with her participatory photographic installation “Touch to See”;
and Clifton Mahangoe (Amsterdam) with “Solar Compass.”

Major Announcement Expected by the End of August

These seven installations, together with the works of the four invited artists and curator Mariia Plekhova’s own installation, will come together in the first major international exhibition dedicated to Media Art organized by the Italia Media Art Festival, which will take place in Rome from November 20 to 22, 2026.

It is the most ambitious project in IMAF’s history, built around the collaboration between Tremamunno and Plekhova: two perspectives, two practices, one shared vision of the relationship between art, technology and exhibition space.

The venue, dates and full program will be announced by the end of August.

KEY FACTS

Video Installations Open Call:
7 installations selected from 31 proposals received · Supported by Snam

Selected artists:
Matteo Campulla (Milan), Annamirka Criscuolo (Minturno), Sandrine Deumier (Toulouse), Edoardo Faglia (Brescia), Claudio Marani (Manziana), Christelle Mas (Oulu), Saul Saguatti (Bologna).

Invited artists:
Maria Korporal (Berlin), Paula Marcondes (São Paulo), Iuliia Nagibneva (Rome), Clifton Mahangoe (Amsterdam).

Curators:
Mariia Plekhova and Marinellys Tremamunno.

First event:
Maker Faire Rome · October 23–25, 2026 · Gazometro Ostiense, Rome.

Next announcement:
Venue for the major IMAF 2026 exhibition, scheduled for November 20–22, 2026.

More information:
www.italiamediaartfestival.it

Marinellys Tremamunno
ITALIA MEDIA ART FESTIVAL
info@italiamediaartfestival.it
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