UNIMATIC x Biennale Bregaglia | The Great Motion

July 22, 2026 Collaborations

BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2026

Change has always been part of human existence, and a means to survive. Transit does not only represent a physical movement in space and time, but it has to do with the changes – either minimal or drastic – that characterize everyday life and set us on a different path as time goes on. Travel has been in human DNA since the beginning of time. Moving is as natural to us as breathing. Like time, life never stops moving, walking, crawling, running, flying.

The 2026 Edition of Biennale Bregaglia, open from June, 7th 2026 to September, 27th 2026,
focuses on the concept of Transit. The event will take place across Val Bregaglia, where visitors will be able to venture through ancient paths and well-known past transit courses, therefore incarnating the spirit of this year’s edition. Along these paths, they’ll be able to see art pieces by many renowned contemporary artists.

Nothing is left to chance, as these works of art find a home in a place where art has bloomed for centuries. Here, in Maloja, Giovanni Segantini found his natural habitat in 1894, where he fell in love with the way the light shone on the Alps. Through his paintings of snowy peaks, dark woods and lonely villages, Segantini reached full artistic maturity in Val Bregaglia. Here, he became friends with Giovanni Giacometti, an artist himself and father to Alberto Giacometti, who was tightly held by the same strong, bittersweet vice with which Val Bregaglia held Segantini.

Alberto Giacometti was born and raised in Borgonovo, Bregaglia, at the beginning of the ‘900s. This natural environment profoundly shaped Giacometti’s vision of the world and art style. Its mountains and woods are often the subject of his artistic research. His small studio in Stampa had a window that opened on the wide skies of Val Bregaglia and its green scenery, which the artist captured frequently as if peeking through a door to something larger than himself and life.

In the same way, when Rainer Maria Rilke fled to Switzerland to find solace and peace in self-exile, he was spellbound when he reached Val Bregaglia. Here, he fell in love with Soglio, a small village at the foot of the mountains. Soglio means threshold, and it refers to the idea that its magical atmosphere could only be attributed to a place where the doors to Heaven opened. Here, at the mercy of the imposing mountains, Rilke found spiritual harmony, while writing poems and researching the ephemerality of human beings and their incapability of communicating with nature.

Segantini, Giacometti, Rilke. All of them were no strangers to motion.

“My entire childhood is bound to these mountains, to this narrow and deep valley of Bregaglia, where the rocks seem to close off the sky. There is something immutable and eternal about these peaks. When I was a child, I used to think the world ended right behind those granite crests. That sense of verticality – of a space both compressed and infinite at the same time – has never left me. It remained inside of me, shaping the way I see things and how I sculpt my figures, which, in the end, are nothing but those very rocks worn down by time, as thin and resilient as blades of grass.”
Alberto Giacometti

BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2026

Pietro Pirelli
Fontana di suono, 2026
Casaccia, Kirche San Gaudenzio
©ecomunicare, Simone Ronzio

BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2026

Simone Berti
Stambecco, 2026
Promontogno, Kirche Nossa Dona (Krypta)
©ecomunicare, Simone Ronzio

BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2026

Dominik Zehnder
Pozzo dei desideri, 2026
Promontogno, Kirche Nossa Dona
©ecomunicare, Simone Ronzio

BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2026

DEM
Bandiere della Bregaglia, 2026
Stampa, Scheune Centro Giacometti
©ecomunicare, Simone Ronzio

BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2026

Haruka Fujita
Ephemeral Passage of Light: colorless and transparent, 2026
Promontogno, Haus auf der alten Brücke
©ecomunicare, Simone Ronzio

BIENNALE BREGAGLIA 2026

Helena von Beust
Vasi communicanti in Bregaia, 2026
Borgonovo, Kirche San Giorgio
©ecomunicare, Simone Ronzio

THE TRANSIT

Across the world, all languages highlight multiple meanings for the term transit, both as a noun and a verb. Transit refers to movement; to passage and crossing; to change and travel. The word is uttered when we speak of moving away, going someplace else, travelling, choosing a diﬀerent life. Being in transit means being nowhere and everywhere all at once, a condition in which we are and, yet, we are not, which allows us to be anything we want and nothing at all. By definition, this place brings forth the beauty of meeting and connecting with the otherness.

Where diﬀerent natural environments and cultural identities meet, new value can be found in the act of sharing. With this in mind, UNIMATIC teamed up with Biennale Bregaglia to design a watch that celebrates this year’s edition and its essence. We travel through space as we travel through time, and as we grow, they move with us.