The 15th edition of the Hradby Samoty experimental audiovisual art festival will take place from August 20 to 22, 2026, at the Coburg Castle in the village of Jelšava.

Hradby Samoty is a space.

A temporarily inhabited world within historic buildings undergoing restoration, bearing the traces of time, memory, and decay. Their genius loci is not a backdrop, but an active part of what is happening here.

Sound, image, and body merge here into a single stream. From ambient textures and noise structures through pulsating techno and tekno rhythms to the extreme realms of black metal and projects on the edge of definition. Visual works do not arise alongside all this, but in direct contact with the space—they overgrow it, disrupt it, and alter its meaning. Performances, interventions, and situations appear and disappear, without a fixed framework, as part of a single living whole.

Hradby Samoty is not a festival in the conventional sense. It is a collective experience. A temporary island of freedom where individual experience meets a shared rhythm. A place where things are not merely observed, but experienced.

Something between escape and confrontation.
Something that arises only here and only for a moment.

The program and schedule can be found at https://www.hradbysamoty.org/