//Cheap Festival 2026, Bologna
This September, the streets of Bologna are once again covered with posters by artists, designers, and dreamers in general, selected under the thematic umbrella ‘Conflitto e Cura’ (Conflict and Healing). It’s the CHEAP Poster and Street Art Festival, in its 6th edition. And I’m glad to be part of it among the more than one hundred participating artists from Italy and all over the world.
CHEAP started in 2013, whose some of past editions I had the chance to catch during some of my many visits to the beloved Italian city, a boiling place of creative and nonconformist energy. Scattered all over Bologna, the posters appear in your field of vision almost by surprise, waking the passerby from their urban trance, reminding that city walls can be more than mere holders of advertisements. Quite the opposite: at their best they, become portals to other ways of thinking, seeing, and imagining life.
My contribution happened somewhat by chance. In 2023, I made a painting called Time Flies, inspired by a story told to me by a friend Branco in my hometown of Curitiba. He remembered a few weeks from his childhood when two little birds (called Bico de Lacre), suddenly appeared in his kitchen and started a friendship with him and his mother. For a couple of weeks, they fed the birds with seeds and water from an eyedropper, until, at some point, the birds decided to leave, while the sweet memory stayed. His mother had passed away a few years before he told me the story, and the kitchen, as well as the house, is still where he lives.
So when he asked me to make a mural on the front wall of his house, I took inspiration from this story. And later, after returning to my studio in Berlin, I decided to repaint the image on canvas, which is the work I submitted to the festival. Now the image of the birds in my friend’s kitchen is on a street corner near Forno Brisa in Bologna, while the canvas itself has found a home with a collector in Berlin, who bought it for his wife as a birthday present.
The CHEAP Festival is now in its sixth edition, which is also its last. But don’t cry: far from dead, CHEAP seems to have simply gathered enough momentum to metamorphose into something else. A transformation that, paradoxically, feels necessary to preserve its fresh, sweet, and sharp edge. So I’m sure there’s a lot more to come from CHEAP in the future. For them, the best of luck and much respect.
CHEAP Instagram / Facebook / LinkedIn Poster photos: PH Margherita Caprilli
