2025 edition
Terminal's cultural offering brings to Udine an innovative, bold, physical, and contemporary circus. The shows presented at Parco Moretti during this ninth edition will go beyond the traditional boundaries of performance, effortlessly blending breathtaking stunt techniques, public space, and artistic visions with a touch of irreverence.One of the key elements of the festival remains its "traversability"—the aim to create a physical and cultural space where spectators can experience the park beyond the moments of live performance. Making Parco Moretti "traversable," transforming it into a surreal airport terminal, is the result of year-round planning. But it is also a method and a proposition: a vision of culture that doesn’t impose a single path, but instead allows itself to be crossed by different audiences, diverse languages, and unexpected stories.Terminal is both a performing arts festival and a collective experience. This is the contemporary circus we envision and tirelessly work to bring to life.Rich in encounters with the local community that inhabits and transforms both the park and the city of Udine, the 2025 edition of the festival reflects on the sense of primordial truth that the circus offers its audience: “Clowns and acrobats are the only performers whose talent is absolute and unquestionable, like that of mathematicians—or even more so, like that of a somersault. Because in this, there can be no illusion of talent: either you fall or you don’t.” So wrote the Goncourt brothers, French authors who witnessed the birth of modern circus—and so too, the program of performances this year plays with risk and the sense of precariousness, key elements for understanding the power of this form of live performance and crucial for grasping the deeper meaning of the circus act.Terminal also aspires to be a bold symbolic proposal: risk and precariousness embraced as generative forces, an attempt to respond to a narrative that, under the guise of safety, justifies the proliferation of control systems and the closure of public spaces.
Making Physical and Mental Spaces Accessible
Terminal was born nine years ago out of a desire to liberate street art from the stigma of decay that is at times unfairly associated with it. The festival was created to offer the city of Udine and its public a way to generate new physical and mental spaces. In this process, street art has evolved into performance art in public spaces; the festival’s programming has expanded, and today it welcomes a truly diverse audience.Terminal is an event for the whole family, but also a cultural proposal that offers even the most discerning spectators a selection of avant-garde performances. Its workshops and educational activities are designed to encourage those attending Terminal 2025 to meet new people, explore new activities and new ways of engaging with public space—to break out of the routines of everyday life and experience how a city lives and breathes through the relationships its inhabitants are capable of creating.This is the spirit of the two organizations that founded Terminal: Circo all’inCirca and Puntozero—cultural enterprises based in Udine, committed to creating welcoming, informal, and deeply human cultural environments.
The Partners
This mission has been embraced by the essential partners who make the festival possible through their support. In particular, the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region and the Municipality of Udine, who recognized the cultural potential of the project and designated it as regionally significant; along with Fondazione Friuli, the Ministry of Culture, and Promoturismo FVG, all institutional partners without whom it would not be possible to build an entire “live performance terminal” in the city of Udine.Finally, the artistic development project is carried out in collaboration with friends and colleagues engaged in promoting contemporary art and public spaces—partners who have helped form the regional network “Intersezioni” and the national network “Talea,” as well as many other local and national cultural players.
The ideas behind the artistic project
Terminal is a precise vision of the world of contemporary art and live entertainment. A perspective with which Associazione Circo all’inCirca has redesigned the cultural proposal once dedicated to street art. The foresight of the municipal administration of Udine has wanted to support and expand a proposal that since its gestation phases had the objective of engaging a transversal audience; therefore a cultural proposal that through live art believes it is possible to enhance the city and the relationship that the public has with it. After a few years of work, the festival has become a point of reference in Italy for contemporary circus and live entertainment, it has structured itself and has taken up a multi-year and European project challenge, which allows it a prospective vision capable of programming in Udine the best companies existing on the world scene and therefore making Friuli Venezia Giulia a center of excellence in this sector. The pillars that give structure and credibility to the entire project are the synergy with local cultural operators and in particular regional, national and European networks, the relationship between the spectator and the public space, contemporary circus as a platform for the meeting and valorization of other disciplines of live entertainment, the support for artistic productions under 30, the meeting between very young circus students and newly graduated professionals, an artistic direction shared between different skills and sensibilities capable of expressing professionalism and prestige, finally the ability to incubate hybrid artistic proposals, therefore to perform the function of container for artistic research. It is thanks to this last ability that in 2018 the "Audiobus" project was born within the festival.