What does it mean to inhabit a time in which nature can no longer be thought of as the opposite of simulation?

For the first time, the 2026 selection is the result of an open call for projects presented in this edition. Mysteriously, the selected works seem to converge around a shared set of concerns, revealing a moment of radical transformation in what we understand as body, identity, memory, landscape and reality. For the participating artists, technology does not necessarily appear as an artificial realm set against some original natural world. It is already part of the environment we inhabit: it permeates our bodies, our affects, the ways in which we represent ourselves, and the ways in which we imagine both the past and the future.

Perhaps for this reason, rather than speaking of an opposition between the natural and the artificial, the programme invites us to ask whether such a distinction is still possible.

The selection of these works forms an ecosystem of questions. What does it mean to be human when we can intervene in the body? What do we understand by nature when our perception of the planet is mediated by data, digital images and simulations? How can we perceive phenomena unfolding across spatial and temporal scales that exceed our own existence? What happens to memory when it can take on a new technological form? How do we construct identity when the body is simultaneously organism, image, interface and social territory? And where do we find community within a society that is increasingly connected and, at the same time, profoundly fragmented?

Perhaps what is emerging is not a society that has abandoned nature in order to enter the artificial once and for all. Perhaps we are witnessing something more ambiguous: a generation that needs to redefine what it understands by nature.

A nature that includes transformable bodies, shifting identities, digitised memories, planetary data, ocean currents, ancestral waters, constructed images, DNA and machines. A nature that also compels us to reconsider our scale, our responsibility and the possible forms of care available to us in the face of processes we cannot fully comprehend. A world in which technology and nature no longer occupy opposite ends of a spectrum, but instead contaminate, modify and produce one another.

These works speak from within that threshold. They do not yet describe a new world, but they allow us to glimpse some of its emerging forms: a young society attempting to recognise itself on a profoundly altered planet while experimenting with other ways of constructing body, identity, community and belonging.