Metamedij

18/05 2026

CUTE BUT PSYCHO: The 28th Media Mediterranea Festival Programme

News

The 28th edition of the Media Mediterranea Festival, organized by the Metamedia Association, will take place from May 29 to June 24, 2026. This year’s festival theme, curated by the KUĆĆA curatorial collective, is titled “CUTE BUT PSYCHO” and explores the intersections of internet aesthetics, affective capitalism, and technological anxiety. The festival program will feature group and solo exhibitions, performances, exhibition tours, a presentation of artistic research, and a DJ program. Events will be held across several locations in Pula: Novo Gallery, the Giardini 2 Club-Bookstore, the Temple of Augustus, and La Resistance.

 

 

FESTIVAL TOPIC

CUTE BUT PSYCHO explores the emotional, superficial, seemingly superfluous intensities of contemporary culture: the cute, the cringe, the zany, the weird – content that circulates endlessly online. Vulnerable aesthetics that render the world adorable, janky, awkward, and hyper-interesting in an I’ll-forget-this-in-two-seconds kind of way. These toxically sweet aesthetic categories that rely upon the schizophrenic infrastructures built on data extraction, coercion and monetization. They uphold platform capitalism that uses affect as currency, extracts data through participation and renders attention a form of labor. Platform aesthetics that function as emotional infrastructures producing attachments, commodified intimacies, and algorithmically mediated identities.  

 

Can’t you just help but wonder what kind of gestures appear in a system of contradiction? Because to participate is to oscillate between carefree pleasure and compulsive performance, between visibility and self-surveillance; contagiously blurring the boundaries between authentic and fake, attractive and repulsive, organic and artificially generated. In such environments, subjectivity becomes co-authored by users, platforms, and generative systems. From frenzied technological systems, bouncing between spectacle and warfare to a world of online radicalization and real-time memefication, ever-agreeing AI chatbots and data-extracting platforms, anyone can get away with anything as long as they are supercute. Although designed to appear democratic, autonomous and objective, both user- and machine- generated content environments survive due to their likeability. A pandering machine; a criticism-repellent media-trained companion that always appeals to us, affirming our biases. Cute is never without terror, subordination and gore. Cute is always psycho. Toxically positive or negative, whichever we prefer at the given moment.   

 

The bully and the victim, the cute psycho exposes these secrets and appropriates all that is furious, hysterical, rabid. In its tender aggression and excessive flexibility, it demonstrates hierarchy and exploitation. Aestheticized as powerless, it appears as an entrancing, but grating expression of dislike. Toying with leisure, entertainment, soft provocation and seduction, it is tactical in its benignity. We are interested in how this vulnerability can function both as strategy and trap, how it can operate as social regulation as much as resistance. Whether coming from a bratty human-abandoned pigeon reflecting on her journey towards obsolescence or a mummified influencer that subverts history-making, CUTE BUT PSYCHO aims to produce critical and engaged imaginaries, open new forms of intimacy, and unsettle established understandings of political, economic and technological infrastructures shaping our corporeality, subjectivity and labor. 

—KUĆĆA

 

FESTIVAL PROGRAMME

FRIDAY

29. 5. 2026.

 

19:00 

CUTE BUT PSYCHO

Andrej Beštak & Anja Leko, Brad Nath, Markéta Slaná, Tea Stražičić

Group exhibition opening

Novo Gallery

Laginjina 7

On view until 24. 6. 2026.

 

20:00

Markéta Slaná

Performance

Novo Gallery

Laginjina 7

 

SUBOTA

30. 5. 2026.

 

11:00 

Guided tour of the exhibition CUTE BUT PSYCHO

Curatorial collective KUĆĆA

Novo Gallery

Laginjina 7

 

12:00 

Tullio della Cortiglia

Artistic research presentation

Club & bookstore Giardini 2

Giardini 2

 

19:00

Love Crimes

Alex Quicho

Lecture performance

Kino Valli

Giardini 1

 

21:00

Ötza, Uninterrupted

Levi van Gelder 

Solo exhibition opening

Temple of Augustus

Forum b.b.

On view until 7. 6. 2026.

 

21:30  

She-Pigeon

Selin Davasse

Performance

Temple of Augustus

Forum b.b.

 

22:00

DJ programme

nemanja 

Paloma  

La Resistance

Emova 1

 

The festival’s organizational team consists of: Marino Jurcan (festival director), KUĆĆA (festival curators), Marijeta Bradić (executive producer), Iva Peručić (exhibition design), Antonela Lukša (production), Nastasja Miletić (production), Boris Vincek (media relations), and Oleg Šuran (graphic design).

The program is realized with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the Kultura Nova Foundation, Istria County, the City of Pula, the City of Zagreb, and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Republic of Croatia, in partnership with the KUĆĆA curatorial collective, the Archaeological Museum of Istria, Novo Gallery, the Pula Film Festival, and the Giardini 2 Club-Bookstore. The festival’s media sponsors are: Istra 24, Kulturistra, TV Nova, and Glas Istre.

Media Mediterranea is a multimedia festival held continuously since 1999, focusing on new media, technology, and contemporary artistic practices. Through exhibitions, workshops, talks, and performances, the festival promotes innovative and interdisciplinary approaches, with a strong emphasis on supporting emerging artists, fostering local and international collaboration, and encouraging critical dialogue between art, audiences, and society. Media Mediterranea engages with pressing social issues and invites reflection on the role of technology and art in today’s world. The festival aims to create an open platform for the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and perspectives – through media ranging from analog to digital, from tactile to virtual.