12. Reciklart took place this year between 31.7. and 28.8.2026, with the main part of the festival taking place between 7.8 and 10.8.2026 at the Square Without Historical Memory (in front of the Alkatraz Gallery) on Metelkova in Ljubljana!
This year, the festival dealt with food awareness, a central theme that was used as a framework for various workshops, exhibitions and lectures, and in the evenings, concerts, performances, circus acts and much more.
As part of the festival in the Alkatraz Gallery, AKC Metelkova mesto we also had an art colony on the topic “Abundance and Food Scarcity”. This time, the colony and then the exhibition took place as a process, visitors could witness the community project of creating the exhibition and the creation of works of art, from July 31st to 28th of August, every day between 10 am and 6 pm.
The installation of the exhibition was finalized on Friday, August 7th, 2026 and was marked by an event and a reception, and on the last day of the festival on Monday, August 10th, 2026 at 6:30 pm, visitors could also participate in a guided tour led by students.
The art colony was held for the second time now, after last year’s well-received edition, this year there was an exchange between Slovenian and Slovak art students. Same as last year, the exchange consists of two parts, the first part of the exchange took place as part of the Reciklart festival in Ljubljana, and the second part will be in Košice, in the spring of 2027. In the week before the festival, the students created works of art that are on display until August 28th.
Aleksandar Božić, Oto Hudec and Erik Sikora participated in the project as mentors.
Food as the driving force of life, something that in the past connected people to nature, the land, has gradually, and recently exponentially, become a consumer good, something that exists in a world in which food is abundant for some, and scarce for others. A world in which food is a commodity, part of the neoliberal regime, where profit dictates the entire process of production, processing and distribution. A world in which the land is exploited, the work of people, especially those in the global south, increasingly under the guise of sustainability. We forget that food often arrives on our plates from great distances, that it is a connection between food as a product, a marketable product packaged in plastic, that it spends more time on the shelves than nature would allow. And above all, that many people are trying to oppose this kind of system and that of course there are good practices from which we can all learn.
All of this and more informs the present exhibition, in which art students, through the exchange of experiences from different cultural backgrounds, tackled such a complex topic in different ways. We witnessed works created collectively, learning about what food, its coexistence of abundance and scarcity, represents for society today, through the exploration of different processes and media, and in what ways they can combine their own practices with the aforementioned topic. An important part of the process was also the merging and transformation of artistic practice into everyday activism and thinking about ways in which, in a world in which even something as primal and important as food is held hostage by capital and human greed, it can become a source of health, care, and well-being for all, not just a few.
Coordinator of art colony: Aleksandar Božić / Kunstleraj
Production: Matafir Association in KUD Mreža
Partners: Jalla Jalla Akc Metelkova, A-Infošop, Print studio Metatisk, YHD
Partner organization: Technical University of Košice, Faculty of Arts
Co-funded by: European Union*, the Municipality of Ljubljana and Ministry of culture RS
* Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the National agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
