Mesh Festival explores new public spaces where digital and physical worlds meet – Open Call

Mesh Festival 2026 comes to life as a festival and open call process that begins at Freilager-Platz 3 in Münchenstein, Switzerland, and unfolds across the city. Rooted in place yet open to the urban fabric, the festival invites the city itself to become part of the conversation.

Bringing together digital and physical spaces, Mesh Festival opens up a shared moment to rethink public space and to imagine, together, a more just, healthier, and more collective relationship with the city.

Urban Actions | Spatial Utopias

Under the title urban actions | spatial utopias, the 2026 edition of Mesh Festival focuses on the spatial impact of digital environments. Moving beyond dominant smart city narratives, the festival explores how public experience is reshaped in hybrid spaces where virtual and physical layers overlap. Technology is approached not merely as a tool, but as an ecological, social, and political actor one that actively shapes possible futures for urban life.

Within this framework, the idea of “spatial utopia” is read not through completed mega-projects like vertical cities or artificial islands, but through ongoing, small-scale, local, and plural initiatives. By placing planned utopias such as those in Abu Dhabi alongside practices of digital colonisation, the festival asks a central question: how can cities become more liveable for people, while resisting the growing dominance of global technology corporations?

Infrastructures of Care

The Mesh Festival 2026 open call extends beyond artists to include technologists, collectives, NGOs, educational initiatives, and neighbourhood-based actors—opening up a wide field of collaboration. Here, “care” is understood as a social, ecological, and technological practice, redefined as an invisible yet vital infrastructure of the urban fabric. By holding reconstruction and new construction in balance, the festival brings together actions already unfolding today with visions and utopias for the future.

From installations and public-space interventions to performances and research-based projects, the diversity of formats turns Mesh Festival into an urban laboratory, one that is not only observed, but experienced. Throughout the process, the city is approached not as a temporary stage, but as a living organism shaped through collective thinking and shared production.

Event: Mesh Festival 2026 – Festival of Art and Technology

Theme: Urban Actions | Spatial Utopias – Infrastructures of Care

Artistic Direction: Teresa Retzer

Festival Dates: 14–18 October 2026

Open Call Deadline: 15 January 2026, 12:00 CET

Responses: From February 2026 onwards

Contact: hello@meshfestival.ch

Press: media@meshfestival.ch

Open Call: opencall@meshfestival.ch

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You can take a look at Mesh Festival 2024 here.