Projection mapping has a persistent credibility problem: at its worst it’s a logo animated onto a building for a brand activation, and there’s a lot of that. Festivals are how the form defends itself — a week where the technique is used for work that has something to say, in public, for free.
MAPP_MTL hits its tenth edition this year, running September 29 to October 4, 2026 across Montreal.
What’s on
The festival spreads across multiple neighbourhoods rather than concentrating on one façade:
- Quartier des spectacles — the downtown cultural district
- Plateau Est
- Digital Block Party, October 1–3
Projection mapping is the core medium, alongside electronic music performances, interactive installations, creative workshops and food vendors. A new creation by Studio Baillat is among the highlighted works. The festival closes on October 4 with a Tagtool Jam featuring Marc-Olivier Lamothe and Téo.
It’s free, with complimentary ticket reservations available for the ticketed components.
MAPP describes itself as a showcase for local and international talent, and as a non-profit its stated mission is developing video mapping as a practice rather than staging a spectacle. The organisation has moved its programming — residencies and performances — to the third floor of Caserne 26.
Trailer from the 2024 edition — the closest look at what the festival actually puts on the walls.
Why the Tagtool jam is the thing to go to
If you only make one night of it, the closing jam is the one with something you can’t get from documentation.
Tagtool is a collaborative live-drawing and animation tool — multiple people draw, animate and puppeteer layers together in real time, projected at scale. It sits somewhere between VJing, live illustration and improvised performance, and it is genuinely live in a way that most projection mapping is not.
That matters because the honest criticism of mapping festivals is that most of the work is a rendered video file played back onto geometry. Beautiful, often, but finished before it arrived. A Tagtool jam is people making marks in front of you, on a building. The failure modes are visible. That’s the difference between a screening and a performance.
The tenth-edition context
Ten years is long enough for a mapping festival to have watched the technology stop being the story. When MAPP started, aligning projected content to irregular architecture was the hard part and the reason to show up. Now the software is mature, the hardware is rentable, and the interesting question is what anybody has to say.
A festival programme that puts a live collaborative drawing jam next to a commissioned studio work next to a block party is a reasonable answer to that: treat mapping as a medium with several registers, not a single trick. Free, outdoors, across a city, in early October in Montreal — dress accordingly.