Grenze-Arsenali Fotografici Festival 2026

We like to think that a Festival can generate a community, one that is permanent and recognizable. To give, to participate become the conditions that make Grenze a way of inhabiting circumstances, inventing a pathway of escape that can be traveled by all.

Images survive.
They hide for a long time and then suddenly resurface within the folds of contemporary imagery, beneath the surface of what today might seem naively new.Their survival is not linear. Images return even after their original context has disappeared. We see them again in certain photographs today—they seem like unconscious citations. Déjà vus. In reality, these fragments of memory reemerge to inhabit forms, contexts, and genres with new meanings—often in tension with the author's original intentions. Warburg spoke of the survival of antiquity in the Renaissance, for example: certain postures, artistic expressions, reappear not as copies, but as “cultural ghosts” (phantasmatische Wiederkehr), charged with new tensions, meanings, and above all, energy.
Nachleben ("afterlife") is an unconscious or semi-conscious cultural memory that crosses centuries and resurfaces in new forms.
This memory is repetition, but also re-elaboration.
Something that is not dead returns and continues to live on—in unexpected ways and forms.

For the 2026 edition, the artistic directors, Simone Azzoni and Francesca Marra, are joined in the curatorship by Greg Tiani and Marta Szymanska, who reinterprets the exhibition dedicated to filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, curated by Simone Azzoni, in a new child-friendly version

Following the exhibitions on Wim Wenders and Pedro Almodóvar, the main exhibition is dedicated to Abbas Kiarostami

Other exhibited artists include Umberto Diecinove, Joel Jimenez Jara, Marjolein Blom, Diana Cheren Nygren and Saku Soukka, selected through an open call; Julieta Averbuj, Vedad Divović, Chiara Innocenti, Roland Schmid, Aline Bovard Rudaz and Yiming Zhu, invited artists outside the open call.

The festival, now in its nineth edition, offers a variety of events: workshops, portfolio reviews, children's performance, book presentations, screenings, and meetings with the artists.