Sensing the Climate - Festival of Ecological Imagination

After seven editions of Resilienze Festival, serra madre embarks on a new path of artistic research and exploration: the Festival of Ecological Imagination is born.

Its first edition, Sensing the Climate, will take place from 1 to 6 October in Bologna, featuring a programme of artistic performances, workshops, talks, and listening sessions that traverse the environmental, social, and emotional transformations we are currently experiencing.

Sensing the Climate explores the ecological crisis not only as an environmental emergency, but as a symptom of a deeper perceptual, emotional, and cultural disconnection. The festival draws on anthropological, philosophical, and ecological perspectives that challenge entrenched dichotomies - between human and non-human, mind and body, nature and culture - proposing instead a paradigm shift and a space for experimentation: to know the world is to enter into relation with it; to repair the world is to restore centrality to the body as both instrument and threshold of that relation.

Rooted in the identity of serra madre, Sensing the Climate blends languages, practices, and disciplines - because only through the encounter and dialogue between art and science, between ecology, the humanities, and the speculative power of art, can we begin to cultivate world-making practices. In this regard, the collaboration with the University of Bologna and Johns Hopkins University has proved especially generative, enriching the festival’s research process.