The Italia Media Art Festival has a setting most festivals would envy and an adjacency most would not have thought of. Its third edition runs October 23–25, 2026 at the Gazometro Ostiense — the skeletal 19th-century gasholder that has become Rome’s default venue for anything industrial-sublime — and it runs there inside Maker Faire Rome, The European Edition, alongside Rome Art Week.
That pairing is the most interesting thing about IMAF. Media art festivals usually happen among media art people. This one drops a curated video art programme into a hall full of people who came to look at 3D printers, and vice versa.
The numbers
IMAF received 144 submissions this year — 113 for Video Art & Performance and 31 for Video Installations — which the organizers say is the highest total in the festival’s history.
From those, 13 video artists were selected through the open call, joined by 4 invited artists. The selected artists come from Italy, Colombia, Bolivia, Switzerland, Russia, Spain, Iran, Greece and China; five of the thirteen competitive slots went to Italian artists.
The theme
Artistic director Marinellys Tremamunno framed the edition around “The Energy That Transforms: Human and Spiritual Strength Turned into Action for the Future.”
Read that against the venue and the sponsors and it stops being abstract. The Gazometro is a decommissioned energy structure. The Video Art & Performance open call is sponsored by Enel, Italy’s largest power utility; the Video Installations category is supported by Snam, the gas infrastructure operator. A festival about transformative energy, inside a dead gasholder, funded by energy companies, is either the most on-the-nose curatorial gesture of the season or a genuinely sharp one, and possibly both.
The festival is promoted by the “Piccola Venezia” APS Association in collaboration with Rome Art Week.
What’s on the ground
The three days include dedicated screening areas and interactive video installation spaces, open to technology professionals, artists, and the general public alike — the Maker Faire crowd, in other words, gets it by default. A premiere screening is planned for an earlier date still to be announced, and a larger international media art exhibition launches in November 2026.
If you’re going
Rome in late October is a dense week: Rome Art Week fills the city’s galleries and studios with open events, and Maker Faire Rome is one of the largest maker events in Europe. IMAF sits at the intersection of the two, which makes it an unusually efficient trip — three distinct scenes in walking distance of each other, with one ticket getting you into the biggest of them.