Biennale dello Strait 2026: a laboratory of thought between Calabria and Sicily to rethink Mediterranean cities and landscapes

How do cities, landscapes and communities change? Is the mutation - before in the forms - in the language? What is the meaning of the border, of the dividing line? Could it be a threshold instead? How do different identities coexist? Are Calabria and Sicily necessarily separate territories or is there another way to reshuffle their memory so that places and people can recognize and interface with each other?

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Complex questions for difficult times sail the sea, from Reggio Calabria to Messina, and seek answers in art, architecture, philosophy, design, photography: the Strait Biennale transforms a strip of the Mediterranean into a large laboratory of thought, from Campo Calabro to the Sicilian shore. With international forays between Agadir and Paris. It is promoted by the Le Cities of the Future Foundation, under the direction of the architect Alfonso Femia - founder and CEO of Atelier(s), with offices in Milan, Genoa and Paris - and, for this 2026 edition, with the contributions of the landscape architect Annalisa Metta, professor at Roma Tre University, and the Moroccan architect-anthropologist Salima Naji.

Eighty-six days of exhibitions, talks, workshops and explorations, different locations, with the declared aim of drawing attention to the mutations of cities and landscapes of the southern and Middle Eastern Mediterranean and of shifting the center of gravity from the Central European area to that of the South, in a long-lasting cultural event (until 13 December, online programme).

«Today cities are fragile and complex organisms in which architecture must become a collective, dynamic, shared path. A project, in this case from shore to shore, capable of capturing the changes taking place at these latitudes, the human ones, the urban ones, of the landscape - explains the architect Femia, from a substantially philosophical point of view -. We are here for this, with our Biennial, which in its name does not recall, like others, a single city, but a territory that has the sea inside. A space in which water is the matrix of the landscape. And bring us closer, bring us together."

At the center of the events, geography, territory, community, elements in a continuous state of transformation, «with a sequence of expansions and contractions, sometimes very rapid, instantaneous – points out Annalisa Metta -. Passages that often generate an evolutionary misalignment that affects cities and territories."