To celebrate is to choose how we continue.
The next 25 years are now.

There are territories that reveal themselves immediately, and others that require a choice in order to emerge. Imaginarius inhabits that interval. As a festival of performing arts in public space, it asserts itself as an unstable place, shaped by choices and movements, where the urban environment ceases to be a backdrop and becomes living matter, marked by frictions, unstable forms of belonging and gestures of resistance. The city appears as a territory under tension and in dispute, crossed by gestures, rituals, masks, and movements that expose inequalities, systems of surveillance, and desires for liberation. Common space becomes both a symbolic and a real field, where identity(ies), belonging, and the collective confront and reinvent themselves. To be present, to occupy, or to pass through is always a sensitive and political act. In this territory, nothing is completed in a single trajectory, everything is built through crossing. Here, the dominant logic is neither linear progression nor predictability. Rhythms overlap and fragment, actions insist, repeat themselves, rise, melt, and push the present to its limits.

Imaginarius summons the vertigo of the now, risk, and irreversibility. It is not about explaining the future, but about making it felt, with the urgency already embedded in the present, within the physical, environmental, and human limits we navigate every day. The festival unfolds across multiple places simultaneously, embracing fragmentation as a condition. And even at this threshold, energy does not disappear. It multiplies and shifts. Play, rhythm, humour, shared effort, and celebration emerge as ways of occupying space and constructing the common. Ephemeral yet intense communities are formed, where movement does not slow down and irreverence is not an escape, but a position. To continue, to repeat, to insist become conscious choices. To resist is also to celebrate, together.

The programme of this edition does not propose a single reading nor a closed map. It is not about covering everything, but about choosing paths. It points to possibilities, to zones of gravity where proposals draw closer, intersect, and create tension. Each person constructs their own Imaginarius, moving between a city in dispute, the future as vertigo and limit(s), and energy as a form of resistance. Choice asserts itself as collective authorship, territory as communal dramaturgy, and impossibility as method. It is up to each of us to navigate these orbits in our own way, knowing that it is through this unstable, sensitive, and shared crossing that imagination becomes a living practice. In three days, the world fits here.

MAIS Imaginarius

Competition for emerging artists working in public space

MAIS Imaginarius creates space for work that is still in process. A zone of risk, trial, and exposure, dedicated to emerging artists working in public space who choose it as a territory of creation and confrontation. Here, proposals are not presented as finished works, but as gestures in direct relationship with the city, its rhythms, its unpredictability, and its audiences.

This section understands public space as active matter rather than a simple backdrop. The selected creations test languages, formats, and cross-disciplinary approaches through real engagement with the territory, accepting instability, friction, and diversity as part of the artistic work itself. MAIS Imaginarius values processes built through encounter, adaptation, and listening, where making mistakes is also a way of learning and moving forward.

Open to national and international artists and collectives, MAIS is fully integrated into the festival programme, asserting a logic that breaks with the idea of periphery or parallel programming. The proposals in competition coexist with the rest of the programme, affirming Imaginarius as a place of passage between generations, where emerging practices enter into dialogue with established contexts and with the living city. The winning project will be invited to develop a new creation to premiere in the 2027 edition, extending this commitment to the future over time and reinforcing Imaginarius as a space for accompaniment, continuity, and collective construction.

FEDEC

In collaboration with FEDEC, the international network for professional circus education, Imaginarius opens space for creations developed by students and recently graduated artists from international circus schools. These proposals inhabit a moment of transition, between learning and affirmation, where artistic practice is still being shaped through direct contact with risk, experimentation, and the need to articulate a distinct voice.

The five selected creations reveal the diversity of languages, formats, and imaginaries that run through contemporary circus. More than final exercises, they are deliberate attempts, dynamic processes in the making, ideas still to be tested in front of an audience and within the real time of a festival. A space of assertion, where experimentation, failure, and persistence coexist, and where an authorial voice begins to take shape.

Extensions

The festival extensions carry Imaginarius beyond its immediate centre, activating other places, audiences and temporalities. By expanding across the territory, the festival asserts itself as a distributed experience, where artistic creation intersects with everyday life, the memory of places and community life. These extensions seek to broaden the experience, decentralise participation and strengthen the relationship between art, territory and community, inviting listening, presence and encounter, and consolidating Imaginarius as a project built within the territory and with those who inhabit it.