COSMO is a festival of temporary architecture that unfolds across the city of Siracusa and the territory of Pantalica, transforming them into an open-air laboratory for reading landscape, history, and contemporary forms of living. Curated by architect Francesco Moncada and the studio Moncada Rangel, COSMO explores architecture as a cultural practice capable of generating dialogue between past and present, permanence and temporality, context and imagination.

The festival is part of the broader project Siracusa Pantalica. Cultural and Touristic Route from the Neapolis Archaeological Park in Siracusa to the Necropolis of Pantalica, promoted by the Municipality of Siracusa and funded through a public call by the Italian Ministry of Tourism aimed at enhancing UNESCO-listed cultural landscapes.

COSMO constructs a physical and conceptual itinerary between Siracusa and Pantalica, two foundational places of the Mediterranean world. Through temporary installations, performances, and spatial interventions, the festival offers a unique experience of architecture and landscape, inviting the public to observe familiar places through a new lens.

The name COSMO derives from the Greek kosmos, a term that defined the harmonious order of the world. For the ancient Greeks, the cosmos was not merely the physical universe, but a system of relationships between nature, architecture, community, and shared values. COSMO adopts this original meaning as a framework to interrogate the present, placing historical heritage in dialogue with contemporary practices of architecture, art, and performance.

Conceived as a distributed urban laboratory, COSMO invites architects and creatives to intervene through temporary installations that activate existing spaces and return them to the public as places of encounter, reflection, and possibility. These interventions act as spatial manifestos, raising questions about the quality, use, and imagination of public space.

The first edition of COSMO is dedicated to the theme Context. Context is understood not as a constraint, but as a living and active condition with which to engage. The invited architects and artists were asked to reflect on Context as a material, cultural, and spatial reality, responding to the specific conditions of Siracusa and Pantalica through site-specific installations and performative actions.

In a city such as Siracusa, defined by centuries of stratification, the relationship with heritage is a constant presence. Yet this relationship often remains confined to preservation, leaving limited room for contemporary interpretation. COSMO emerges from the need to open this discussion, proposing temporary architecture as a tool for interpretation rather than imitation, capable of suspending certainties, encouraging new ways of seeing, and generating questions about the spaces we inhabit every day.

The three installations of the first edition trace a virtual thread between Siracusa and Pantalica, promoting the territory of Siracusa Pantalica through an alternative model of cultural production addressed to an international audience. By inviting architects and artists whose work has shaped contemporary discourse on architecture, public space, and the relationship between body, landscape, and construction, COSMO positions Siracusa and Pantalica within an international network of research and experimentation, reaffirming architecture as a cultural practice capable of producing vision, dialogue, and awareness.

Simone Bossi © 2026