The Art Explora Festival and its museum boat will dock in Piraeus, close to Athens
by Art Explora Festival 20 Jul 22:17 NZST
3-12 October 2025
The Art Explora Festival © Art Explora
As part of its commitment to sharing culture with as many people as possible, Art Explora launched in 2024 the Art Explora Festival, a travelling festival that sails across the seas and oceans on board the world's first museum boat.
It brings visitors innovative artistic and cultural experiences free of charge on board the museum boat, as well as quayside and in a range of venues in the host cities. The programming includes immersive visual, sound, and virtual reality experiences, exhibitions, and a rich live programme featuring concerts, dance, discussions, and workshops.
After welcoming over 300 000 visitors across its previous Mediterranean stopovers — in Valletta (Malta), Venice (Italy), Marseille (France), Tangier and Rabat (Morocco), Málaga (Spain), Durrës (Albania), Nice (France), the Art Explora Festival will head to Greece following its stop in Rijeka (Croatia). From 3 to 12 October 2025, the festival and its unique museum boat will dock at Piraeus Port for the very first time with a programme curated both by Art Explora and Katerina Tselou, Greek curator.
"Mobility and artistic creation are powerful tools to help challenge perspectives and share images and stories to create different relationships with the world. Boarding a boat is an experience in itself; it's even more remarkable when you find unique artistic and cultural endeavours on that boat, as well as quayside." - Frédéric Jousset, Art Explora Founder and President
Programme of the Art Explora Festival in Piraeus, Athens from 3 To 12 October
The festival is hosted aboard the world's first museum boat, as well as quayside in various exhibition pavilions and communal spaces. The festival offers packages tailored to all audiences, with dedicated tours and workshops for schools and local groups.
With the capacity to host up to 2,000 visitors per day, this 47-meterlong and 55-meter-high sailing catamaran is the world's first traveling museum boat. Designed by architects Alex de Beaufort and Guillaume Verdier and built at the Perini Navi shipyard in Italy, it meets the most ambitious technological requirements, as well as those for welcoming the public on board.
Immersive experiences on board the museum boat
- On the upper deck: An immersive audio experience centred around the richness and diversity of the Mediterranean, designed and produced by IRCAM (the French Institute for Research in Acoustics/ Music at the Pompidou Centre in Paris) and Ircam Amplify.
- Inside the boat: Travel through time and space with the Mediterranean Wonders virtual reality series. Developed with Ubisoft, this installation allows you to experience iconic Mediterranean cities such as Athens, Alexandria and Venice.
Exhibition pavilions quayside
Live program
A multidisciplinary and free programme of performances, concerts, film screenings, dance
shows, workshops and discussions open to everyone.
Curated by Katerina Tselou, Greek curator
"In Piraeus — a mesh of cultures, bodies, and maritime routes — the Mediterranean emerges as a multilayered space of experience, tension, and imagination. Personal and political histories, ecological concerns, and female perspectives come together to form an explosive, polyphonic landscape, where art becomes an act of poetry and resistance.
In the port of Piraeus — a place of arrival and departure, a gateway to the islands and the southern shores — voices and gestures converge to speak of lives in motion: threatened, yet insistent and assertive." - Katerina Tselou, Greek curator