Upside down / Sottosopra

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be.

Alice knew it. The world turned upside down is not a mistake – it is a method. It is how imagination opens breaches of possibility within reality. Turning things upside down means overturning the house to rediscover, in some forgotten box, old family films; but history itself can also be turned upside down. What if archives of private memory could help us look at the past and present in new ways? Images no authority ever commissioned, off-screen voices, films made out of love – sometimes by chance. “History must be brushed against the grain,” Walter Benjamin wrote – and archives often help us do exactly that. To turn the world upside down, then, and discover that oppression, hunger, wars, poverty and social injustice, discrimination and violence against bodies might perhaps disappear.

Upside Down is the title of the 19th edition of Archivio Aperto Festival, taking place in Bologna from October 22 to 26, 2026.

Dedicated to those who have searched – and to those who are still searching – for new possible worlds.