Bosco Colto 2026 — Thinking with Animals, building community

TLDR. Bosco Colto 2026 — Thinking with Animals — eleven days in the Boschi di Santo Pietro, Caltagirone: eight international workshops spanning architecture, design, art and research, a wood-fired kiln inaugurated in the forest, site-specific structures built with local materials. Organized by Makramè APS with scientific direction by Marco Navarra, Dario Felice, Antonio Scarponi and Beatrice Fontana. July 30 – August 9, 2026 · Boschi di Santo Pietro · Caltagirone, Sicily

Bosco Colto — the project

Bosco Colto is a concept before it is a campus. The name expresses the close link between culture and cultivation — two ideas that in Italian converge in the word “colto”: educated, and tended.

The project promotes a regeneration of territory and cities by valuing forgotten resources and removed vocations. It activates processes of civic participation by multiplying relationships and exchanges to build community. It imagines the city as a forest where cultures and cultivations intertwine — and the forest as a city where a community lives and represents itself.

The campus takes place every summer in the Boschi di Santo Pietro, near Caltagirone, Sicily. Organized by Makramè APS — a cultural association based in Catania working at the intersection of architecture, ecology and participatory practices — each edition brings together international tutors, students of architecture, design and art, and the local community around a central theme.

The campus is a temporary construction site: in eleven days, things are built, using local materials, traditional techniques and technological hybridizations.

BC26 — Thinking with Animals

The 2026 edition — July 30 to August 9, in the Boschi di Santo Pietro — was dedicated to Thinking with Animals.

The theme carries real political weight. In the era of the New Climatic Regime, thinking with animals becomes an exercise in decentering: observing nature from within, allowing ourselves to be traversed by it, until we recognize ourselves as part of a shared terrestrial body. It is a political gesture — withdrawing from the hierarchies that separate humans from the world, deactivating the economies of domination and extraction that have reduced the Earth to a resource and the living to an object.

The scientific direction — Marco Navarra (Unict, NOWA), Dario Felice (Unipa, Analogique, Makramè APS), Antonio Scarponi and Beatrice Fontana (Institute for Spatial Thinking, Zurich) — built a programme in which each workshop declined the theme in a different way: from architecture to sound, ceramics to photography, ecology to historical research.

The 2026 visual identity was designed by the Brickbat collective: five animal movements, represented in 5–6 steps, translated into a graphic signature with a custom typeface designed to “reason like an animal”. A palette that avoids the literal colours of animals — violet, grey, pale blue — to return something enigmatic and not yet classified.

The workshops

Eight workshops ran in parallel for eleven days, constructing structures, installations and site-specific research in the forests and village of Santo Pietro.

Sicilian Satoyama (w/ Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Atelier Bow-Wow — Wolf Prize in Architecture 2022) — a vegetable garden within ancient stone walls, a gazebo of eight chestnut columns, a mulberry grove transformed into a cool resting place through pruning and dry-stone terracing. Addition and subtraction as recomposition of landscape.

Sound, Ceramics and Communities (w/ Domenico Mangano and Marieke van Rooy, curated by Salvatore Lacagnina) — ceramic whistles made from clay, olive ash and Sicilian sand. The moment when a clear note brings shared joy to everyone. A work about people and their stories, not just clay. The project is a winner of the Italian Council XIV edition by the Ministry of Culture. Project page on Makramè →

Observatories (w/ Food Hack Lab, Basque Country) — nine “witnesses” made from cork and 3D-printed PETG, inhabiting nine forest sites across the Bosco di Santo Pietro and the Sughereta di Niscemi. Their ESP32 sensors measure temperature, humidity and ambient sound, transmitting small data packets via LoRa network. A discreet, shared form of listening — that lets the forest speak in its own voice.

The Study of the Ancient Order of the Oaks of Santo Pietro (w/ Fabio Ciaravella) — the relationship between the Forest and the communities of Caltagirone, the traces of an ancient power group that may have been its founding caretaker. The forest and the town as bound in a complementary relationship offering a model for new forms of interspecies coexistence.

Attention au Chien / Nancy School (w/ Nicolas Depoutot, tout terrain) — the dog as guide for exploring interspecies relationships, reversing the usual roles of leader and follower, observer and observed.

More-Than-Human Audio Worlds (w/ Maja Avnat, Matters of Activity, Berlin) — audio pieces documenting the campus experience, accessible via QR code at the exact location in which each piece was recorded. An invitation to listen where you stand.

Skin Climate Action / Darmstadt School (w/ Johanna Schmeisser) — a ruined room transformed with lime, water, linseed oil and impregnated linen. Care as a design act: clearing, cleaning, repairing — knowledge transmitted through shared labour.

Processo (Off Program) (w/ Collettivo Stilles Örtchen) — born while waiting, on the threshold. A relational biopause.

The Train Kiln

On Saturday, August 1st, behind the former church of the Village of Santo Pietro, the Train Kiln was inaugurated: a wood-fired kiln for ceramic firing, built as part of the BC26 campus. The project is the natural continuation of the artistic path initiated by Domenico Mangano and Marieke van Rooy in the two previous editions — their workshop Sound, Ceramics and Communities continues to explore the intersection of ceramics, community and performance.

It is the second Train Kiln built in Italy, and the first permanent infrastructure of Casa Bosco Colto.

The kiln was designed and built under the technical guidance of ceramicists Prof. Ted Neal (Ball State University, Indiana — one of the world’s leading experts in Train Kilns) and Prof. Michał Puszczyński (Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, Poland — member of the International Academy of Ceramics). Its construction reclaims a historical bond: for centuries, the Bosco di Santo Pietro fuelled the kilns of Caltagirone, making the city’s ceramic tradition famous. The Train Kiln brings firing back into the forest.

The kiln can reach temperatures up to 1,350 °C. Natural ash deposits on ceramic surfaces create textures and colour effects characteristic of wood firing — a chemical process that transforms what the eye sees as simple matter into something unexpected.

Casa Bosco Colto — the long-term project

BC26 is a step in a longer journey.

This year, a Special Public-Private Partnership (PPPS) process was initiated to enhance buildings and areas within the forest-village ecosystem where the campus takes place. Two public sites — the former Forest Ranger House and the former Schools — become the complementary poles of Casa Bosco Colto: a distributed cultural centre spanning buildings, paths, forests and village, dedicated to culture, care and education, open to the local community year-round.

The goal is to transform the episodic campus experience into a stable platform for research and community activation — generating new professional trajectories in inner areas, rooted in Mediterranean ecosystems.

Credits BC26

Organization: Makramè APS Scientific direction: Marco Navarra (Unict, NOWA), Dario Felice (Unipa, Analogique, Makramè APS), Antonio Scarponi and Beatrice Fontana (Institute for Spatial Thinking, Zurich) Contemporary art consultancy: Salvatore Lacagnina Graphic design: Brickbat (Francesca Barizza, Corinne Carlin, Maria Giulia Leonardi, Alice Teodorani, Tobia Farinati) Executive design: Francesca Fossati, Massimiliano Mauro, Gloria Pulvirenti, Alessandra Gervasio Photography: Giuliana Lo Presti, Davide Piro, Marco Sciré Media partner: The Architecture Curator (Florence), LetteraVentidue Edizioni (Syracuse), Pianeta.Studio

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Pianeta.Studio is media and tech partner of Bosco Colto. Pianeta.Studio’s contribution to BC26 →