New ways of thinking together to reshape the city: Performing Architecture is a widespread festival in Italy and Europe that weaves together architecture and the performing arts to transform urban space alongside its inhabitants.
Born from the collaboration between BASE and DOPO?, the festival invites a new generation of architects to explore architecture as a living practice—one that challenges conventions and opens up new possibilities for social interaction.
Through performances, installations, and public actions, the festival experiments with hybrid design approaches, where the body and space engage in dialogue to rewrite how we experience the city. This multidisciplinary process not only intersects architecture, culture, and education but also contributes to making urban life richer, more inclusive, and joyful.
Performing Architecture becomes a book: a collective reflection that expands the festival experience through essays and conversations, offering new perspectives on Milan’s outskirts and on the relationship between bodies, space, and the city.
Performing Architecture goes to Concéntrico Festival with Lemonot and the O–SH collective
Concéntrico is a laboratory for urban innovation that uses architecture and design to strengthen communities and reimagine public space.
Launched in 2015 as the International Festival of Architecture and Design in Logroño, it has delivered more than 150 interventions in its ten-year history.
Lemonot + O–SH bring Ser Miento to Logroño, taking performative architecture international
1,200 bundles of reclaimed vine shoots — the winter leftovers of Rioja’s vineyards — are reinvented as architecture. A soft, curved structure emerges from the wood, welcoming locals and visitors with shade, shelter, and a communal table suspended just above street level. Architecture you can barbecue on.
In Berlin, Performing Architecture becomes an artist residency at ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics
ZK/U is an independent, interdisciplinary cultural center founded in 2012 in Berlin Moabit. It connects artistic research and social innovation, exploring urban dynamics through exhibitions, public programs, and open-format events.
To date, it has hosted over 800 artists from around the world, becoming a key space for those working at the intersection of art, cities, and society.
The residency will be held in August 2025 by the winning artists Franca Petroni and Leonardo Ruvolo.
Their project Porous Cartographies reimagines the geographies of public space through site-specific mapping, writing, and archival practices.
In response to urban gentrification and privatization, Porous Cartographies reclaims the city as both a political and emotional space, imagining new maps not for control, but for opening up possibilities — an archive and a cartography to move through space with instinct, care, and critical awareness.
The festival connects five neighborhoods in Milano’s southern outskirts—Corvetto, Chiaravalle, Stadera, Barona, and Tortona—creating a symbolic path, an imaginary line that links and reimagines these spaces.
Each neighborhood involved in the festival will host a site-specific intervention—a temporary installation—designed by an architect and a performer in collaboration with a local organization rooted in the area. Five neighborhoods, five ways of rethinking architecture.
01. Tortona: Another Week
AT: BASE Milano
ARCHITECTURE: Matilde Cassani Studio
PERFORMING: Martina Rota
Architecture is a suspended space. Between inside and outside, between productive time and time for escape. In BASE’s Ground Hall, Another Week by Matilde Cassani Studio transforms the Fuorisalone into an experience of slowing down. A large carpet of soles absorbs the footprints of visitors, while long rugs and sports mats invite people to pause, inhabit the space, and reconsider the frenzy of Milan’s design weeks.
The idea of bodies, performance, and community is also at the heart of With All My Strength by artist Martina Rota, who works within the visual arts field and will activate Cassani’s installation.
02. Barona: VANDALI
AT: BARRIO’S
ARCHITECTURE: Studiolatte
PERFORMING: Babau
Barrio’s transforms into a soundscape with VANDALI: interactive sculptures by Studiolatte and Babau invite the public to improvise with sound, rewriting urban space. Inspired by vandalism as a creative act, the project turns architecture into a collective, living, and ever-evolving score.
EVERYDAY FROM 12PM TO 7PM
03. Corvetto: Fuga dalla città?
AT: DOPO?
ARCHITECTURE: Sbagliato
PERFORMING: Caterina Gobbi + Campo Base Project
Sbagliato and Caterina Gobbi turn DOPO? into a spatial and sonic refuge. Escape from the City? plays on the contrast between the allure of the Fuorisalone and the need for quiet. Trompe-l’œil and sound installations reconnect Milan with an imagined nature, creating a short circuit between urban rhythms and a suspended dimension.
04. Stadera: Arena Stadera
AT: Stadera Design District
ARCHITECTURE: Fantastudio, Sara Ricciardi Studio
PERFORMING: Annamaria Ajmone
Giardino Gianfranco Bianchi becomes Arena Stadera, an installation exploring the concept of hospitality. Innocenti tubes and fabrics create a space for exchange, where words and images tell stories of community. Events, performances, and workshops transform the arena into a place of connection and active participation.
05. Chiaravalle: Macchine da Festa
AT: Terzo Paesaggio
ARCHITECTURE: Lemonot
PERFORMING: Luca Boffi / Alberonero
In the garden of Padiglione Chiaravalle, Macchine da festa by Lemonot and Luca Boffi brings together baking, fermentation, and conviviality. Two mobile laboratories and a traveling table host banquets and communal dinners, creating a suspended space between learning and gathering, where food becomes a universal language.
Nomadic architectural devices, tools for aesthetic and political activation. Performing Architecture is among the winning projects of the Festival Architettura, promoted by the Italian Ministry of Culture to support and enhance contemporary Italian architecture. A project that intertwines experimentation and outreach with a social objective: rethinking the role of architecture in cities.
