Loop Festival 2026: Xiu Xiu
World-building begins with dwellings and with the question of how to create and inhabit spaces that are more caring, just, and more attuned to the plurality of lives they host. At a time when many lives, human and nonhuman, are increasingly displaced and threatened, Loop Festival turns to the conditions of inhabiting and sharing space. It approaches architecture not only as built form but as a set of relationships shaped by coexistence, interdependence, and responsibility, bringing together environmental and social justice in a broader reflection on how the idea of “we” is shaped by how we choose and want to live together.
Artists’ cinema offers a particularly sensitive medium through which to engage with space. For this edition, Loop Festival focuses on its sonic and aural dimensions, attending to forms of perception that often remain secondary within artistic and architectural discourses. The title Xiu Xiu (meaning whispers in Catalan), evokes modes of transmission that are intimate, subtle, and often at the threshold of audibility. Whispers move between bodies carrying fragments of knowledge, memory, and affect. They are sounds and words transmitted in intimacy. They try to hide and circulate quietly. They move from our lips to someone else’s ears, like a soft, almost imperceptible breeze, turning the hearer into a beholder of a special message that only they have heard. Whispers are tiny beings that multiply at an impressive speed. Few things run or hide as quickly as a whispered secret.
This year, the programme brings together works that engage with these intimate, discrete and pervasive registers in different ways. Some attend to intimacy and grief, others to distant or suppressed histories, others to forms of communication across species, addressing plants, animals, materials, and atmospheres. Others unfold through movement and gesture, recalling choreographies that have been marginalised or forbidden. Across these approaches, the works explore how spaces are constituted through relations, and how forms of living emerge through shared conditions of presence.
Xiu Xiu focuses on the sites where these relations become most tangible: domestic and public spaces, infrastructures and thresholds, marginal and overlooked environments. From the microarchitectures that sustain nonhuman life to the unplanned ways in which animals, plants, and materials inhabit the city, the programme attunes itself to Barcelona’s quieter forms of living. Public museums and institutions, cinemas, independent initiatives, and architectural landmarks become hosts for a distributed series of screenings, installations and performances.
In this context, Xiu Xiu expands architectural thinking beyond the human, foregrounding the multispecies and material ecologies that shape urban life. It positions artists’ cinema as a tool for listening and attunement, capable of engaging with the temporal and sensory complexities of the built environment. At the same time, it strengthens collaborations across Barcelona’s cultural institutions, forming a programme that reflects the heterogeneity of the city itself.
Original concept conceived and written by Filipa Ramos, former Artistic Director of Loop Festival and Symposium, and developed by Aitana Vélez and Eva Pobeda.
