24/04 2025
Media Mediterranea 27: This Year with the Topic “H2O Interface”
From May 26 to 30, 2025, Pula will once again become a hub of contemporary art thanks to the 27th edition of the Media Mediterranea Festival, organized by the Metamedia Association. This year, the festival brings together artists, designers, and audiences around the intriguing and multilayered theme “H2O Interface,” which explores the symbolism, politics, and poetics of water as a medium, an element, and a concept.
The festival program offers a rich variety of content across several formats: a video program, a group exhibition, a speculative design practice workshop, a pop-up exhibition, and a DJ party. A particularly attractive feature of the festival’s pre-program will be the evening video projections on the monumental video wall of the Archaeological Museum of Istria, set in the atmospheric environment of the Small Roman Theatre.
In addition to this open-air setting, the festival’s program will take place at the Novo Gallery, the Juraj Dobrila University, and the Kotač Club of the Rojc Community Center.
This year’s edition of Media Mediterranea invites the public to dive into new worlds of perception and technology, questioning their own relationship with water—and the world around them.
Festival Topic:
DARKO FRITZ
H2O Interface
“Dip your finger into the sea, and you are connected to the whole world”
(a saying of unknown origin, also used in Croatia)
The Media Mediterranea 27 festival, titled H2O Interface, presents artistic works that question the role of water on planet Earth, its interfaces, and the interaction of all entities. The project examines the relationships between water and diverse groups of living organisms—including humans, animals, fungi, plants, viruses, and others—aiming to expand the vocabulary of networks of living organisms and objects in complex relationships within the post-digital paradigm. In this paradigm, technology is interwoven with nearly every aspect of the contemporary world while still maintaining its connection to nature. The project explores the intertwined fields of natural processes, technology, and social interactions across a broad spectrum of interests, including biology, zoology, physics, chemistry, growth processes, network cultures, sonification and data visualization, real-time data transfer, and more.
Humans, composed of approximately 70% water, live on a planet where 71% of the surface is covered by water. Freshwater accounts for only 2.75% of all water on Earth, with the majority—2.14%—stored in polar ice caps, while 0.61% exists as groundwater. The remaining freshwater is found in lakes, soil, the atmosphere, and rivers.
How do living beings—plants, animals, and humans—as well as the inorganic world interact with water in all its forms and aggregate states?
What are the interfaces through which the ever-changing forms of water communicate with other material entities?
What relationships and interfaces emerge through human economies—such as fishing, piracy, smuggling of goods and people, tourism—and, furthermore, for the energy needs of all other actors of the Anthropocene?
How do human-made products, water supply infrastructures, underwater data transmission cables, fishing nets and traps, hydroelectric plants, beaches, lighthouses, and other artifacts impact the broader Anthropocene?
Unlike many contemporary artworks in which metaphorical reflection on a chosen theme is the sole content of the work, the selected artistic pieces in this project aesthetically reflect the processes occurring in our environment by incorporating the processes themselves or their precise representations through the use of scientific data as artistic material. These works employ innovative technological methods of data processing, sometimes in real time, forming new aesthetic and cognitive wholes. All participants of the Anthropocene are connected through sound—one of the rare manifestations of the material world that exists perpetually in a physical sense. Thus, particular attention is given to sound in visual works, sound art, and acoustic ecologies.
Commenting on the distorted dichotomy between culture and nature, Bruno Latour in 1989 urges that we—as humans—must rethink our perspectives to conceive a “Parliament of Things,” where natural and social phenomena, along with the discourses surrounding them, are not seen as separate objects studied by specialists but as hybrids made and examined through public interaction between things and concepts. Following Latour’s ideas, we can imagine the possibility of conceptualizing larger networks where non-human actors transcend predefined proportions, appearing as rendered entities through the act of observation, within the very processes of which they are a part.
Festival Program
MONDAY, MAY 26, 2025
Speculative design workshop, Day 1
Video program (Small Roman Theatre)
Participants: Nigel Helyer, Toni Meštrović, Robertina Šebjanič, Karla Brunet
TUESDAY, MAY 27, 2025
Speculative design workshop, Day 2
Discursive program at Juraj Dobrila University (Faculty of Informatics)
(Intended for students, open to the public)
WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 2025
Speculative design workshop, Day 3
Opening of group exhibition “H₂O Interface” (Novo Gallery)
Participants: Leah Barclay, Karla Brunet, Nigel Helyer, Toni Meštrović, Dijana Protić, Robertina Šebjanič / Crespo / McCormick
Curator-led tour by Darko Fritz and discussion with present artists
THURSDAY, MAY 29, 2025
Speculative design workshop, Day 4
Artist Talk: conversations with artists (Novo Gallery)
FRIDAY, MAY 30, 2025
Speculative design workshop, Day 5
Opening of the speculative design pop-up exhibition
Closing party “Blue Current” at Kotač Club (DC Rojc)
Performers: Ilija Rudman and DJ Evan. Admission: €15.
