Public Engagement 2026-27

Exhibition launch | 20 March 2026

Alter–Atlas of Borders. Sensitive Maps of Changing Worlds is an exhibition curated by Laura Lo Presti, bringing together a selection of works created by students from the Mobility Studies and Geography courses at the University of Padua. The exhibition explores borders not only as geopolitical lines, but as embodied thresholds. Through the lens of critical and humanistic cartographies, the exhibited works engage with themes of mobility, estrangement, and the shifting conditions of belonging. Borders emerge here as affective, relational, and more-than-representational formations, shaped by bodies, memories, and everyday practices.

The exhibition unfolds through a series of small installations, video-performances, and printed maps, each accompanied by short explanatory texts in Italian and English. Together, these works propose alternative ways of seeing and inhabiting borders, inviting visitors to reflect on the political and experiential dimensions of mapping in a world in constant transformation.

Alter–Atlas of Borders is an invitation to rethink maps as living, situated practices, capable not only of representing the world, but of questioning, transforming, and reimagining it.

The exhibition opens on Friday 20 March at 17:00 and will be on view until 5 May 2026 at the Museum of Geography, University of Padua.

Opening hours:
Tuesdays, 15:00–18:00
Sundays, 14:30–18:30

Events

28–29 March, various times

Let’s Play with the World’s Languages

Family event with children

An unmissable opportunity to explore the role of borders and mapping within the global linguistic framework. The event will feature four activities inside the spaces of the Museum of Geography. The exhibition Alter-Atlas of Borders will host the first stop of this engaging and educational journey aimed at children and young people up to 15 years old. More details and tickets will be made available on this page soon.

Click here for more information and to take part in the event!

2 April, 6:45 PM

altars.csv – Musical Performance on Cartography and Movement

by Mattia Benedetti: live electronics and Greta Romani: clarinet / percussion

Audio / Video / Text: the live performance uses these three elements as the basis of an algorithmic exploration. It starts from map fragments (as a deconstructed, lo-fi visual element), textual debris (verb extractions from 19th-century novels, maintenance condition annotations, piles of incomprehensible characters) and scattered data (location identification codes, Excel spreadsheets, latitude and longitude) to arrive at a rarefied and suspended expressiveness.

Click here to register for free and take part in the event!

10 April, 5:30 PM

Art, Cartography and the Geopolitics of Care?

A talk with Laura Canali

A public talk with artist and cartographer Laura Canali, author of the maps for Limes, dedicated to the relationships between art, cartography and geopolitics. The conversation will reflect on how artistic cartography can challenge dominant geopolitical representations and open up different ways of imagining borders: not just lines of control and separation, but also spaces of relationship, vulnerability and care. To follow, a guided tour of the exhibition Alter–Atlas of Borders: Sensitive Maps of Changing Worlds.

Click here to register for free and take part in the event!

21 April, 4:30 PM

Tied Routes: A Gaming Experience on Migration Routes

With Daniel Zilio, Isabel Rasmussen

An open public gaming session dedicated to Tied Routes, a hybrid (physical-digital) serious game that invites participants to take on the role of a migrant on a journey. Through choices, obstacles and unexpected events, the game allows players to immersively explore the complexity, uncertainty and constraints that characterise contemporary migration routes.

Click here to register for free and take part in the event!

Curated by Chiara Rabbiosi and Ginevra Montefusco, the Questioning Food, Mobilities, and Development exhibition will open on February 6 at 09.30 am and will be open to the public until February 8, 2026 at the Museum of Geography, Palazzo Wollemborg, Via del Santo 26, Padova.

Representing the culmination of the Space, Place, and Mobility course unit, this exhibition showcases a rich and creative learning journey developed in collaboration with students from the Local Development and Mobility Studies Master’s programmes. It is also connected to the activities of the Food Communities Empowerment research group and forms part of the activities conducted within the Post-development Geographies of Local Food Systems: Community-Based Networks Addressing Food Insecurity PRIN 2022 PNRR project, which is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.

Starting from the core geographical concepts of space, place and scale, the exhibition progressively explores the multiple meanings of food ‘on the move’, including the material, symbolic, political and relational aspects. Designed as a pedagogical experiment, the exhibition is a result of an educational training integrating theoretical frameworks, empirical case studies, and creative experimentation.

The exhibition format translates this research and teaching endeavour into an open, participatory experience, demonstrating how creative methodologies can foster learning by doing while engaging wider audiences beyond the classroom and boosting the university’s societal impact.

On Thursday, January 15th, concluding the international conference “Urban Mobility Cultures: Creative and Narrative Approaches to Moving in the City”, organized by the DiSSGeA department of the University of Padua in collaboration with the Mobility and the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies, the museum hosted the pre-vernissage of the exhibition Dance Moves. Walking and drawing in the city, by artist-researcher Tânia A. Cardoso and MoHu member Giada Peterle.

The exhibition hosted several works by illustrator and urban planner Tânia Alexandra Cardoso, who explores the poetics of everyday life, using graphic art to question and co-create the urban environment.

The comic story Dance Moves emerges from an interdisciplinary dialogue between architecture, geography, urban studies, and graphic languages, developed over the years through creative workshops, conferences, and jointly conducted lessons. However, it is primarily the most structured outcome of the “walkshop” titled Walking with the city, a walking workshop organized in April 2025 to engage students from the University of Padua, particularly those from the Master’s Degree Course in Landscape Sciences.

This event, and more generally the conference, are part of the WALC – Walking Landscapes of Urban Cultures research project, which involved the Universities of Bologna, Padua, and Milan Bicocca.

The exhibition will be open from 16 Jan 2026 to 15 Feb 2026.

Walking is a way of observing that becomes an immersive experience of the city. It is an act of unveiling, capable of grasping, through urban metamorphoses, the signs of social and climatic change. It is also an act of rewriting, a tool for rethinking and designing urban space beyond established routes. Walking with the city and its inhabitants, human and more-than-human, is at once a political and poetic, social and intimate, critical and creative gesture. As a social practice, walking activates new communities in motion that are aware of the transformative potential of their own steps.

WALC! is an invitation to walk together in our cities.

The exhibition WALC! is the outcome of the project Walking Landscapes of Urban Cultures, which involved the Universities of Bologna, Padua, and Milan Bicocca. Drawing on three different disciplinary perspectives, literary studies, cultural geography, and urban sociology, the research groups coordinated by Filippo Milani, Giada Peterle, and Luca Daconto investigated the complexity of urban walking cultures through transdisciplinary methodologies.

The exhibition itinerary winds its way through the transdisciplinary restitutions of the three research units, which have interpreted their cities as living laboratories for listening to, recounting, and imagining the cultures of urban walking.

Using different languages, each city contributes to the unveiling of new perspectives for those who walk in the city and observe landscapes in constant transformation.

Between Geography and Art

The Padua research unit developed urban itineraries through an open dialogue between geography, art, and creative languages. In collaboration with the Creativity Area of the Progetto Giovani Office of the Municipality of Padua, the Padua research unit launched MAR (Mobile Art Residency), an artist residency that led to the permanent installation of public artworks by Daniele Costa and Caterina Morigi in the train station area.

Together with photographer Marco Lumini, the research unit curated the project Sulla soglia, exhibited at San Gaetano Cultural Centre.

At the Museum of Geography, we present the results of a dialogue with illustrator and urban researcher Tânia A. Cardoso, whose work explores the poetics of everyday life, using graphic art to question and co-create the urban environment.

Exhibition venues

Altinate S. Gaetano Cultural Center – Exhibition | Via Altinate 71, Padua

Opening: January 16, 2026, at 6:00 p.m.

Duration: January 16-February 15

Free admission exhibition

Tuesday to Sunday | 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.