Cortona On The Move 2025

Cortona On The Move returns to Italy for its 15th edition delving into the nature of wounds and the process of healing, under the theme Come Together.

Overview

This year’s theme emerged for Paolo Woods while closing last year’s festival, on 4 November, the day before the US elections. The results of those elections made him realize that we live in an increasingly divided world where fault lines widen into open wounds and extremism feeds on polarization, where opposing sides do not speak but shout.

Woods wondered whether the festival should be a mirror of this world or should it try to direct our gaze towards something much more difficult to describe but much more important to achieve: reconciliation. The festival will delve into the nature of wounds and the process of healing. Come Together will explore why reconciliation is the only viable option, probing some of the many ways to achieve it—socially, politically and personally. Because indeed, reconciliation is not only with the other but foremost with oneself.

This 15th anniversary edition doesn’t seek to offer easy answers. Instead, it studies the spaces between ruptures and repair, between conflict and unity, exploring what it means to find common ground when the ground itself often feels like it’s falling away. We come to realize that reconciliation is not solely a compromise but requires us to embrace paradigm shifts and affirm new ways of being.

Come Together will be beautiful but also raw, messy and rough-edged. It is about the force and courage that keeps us trying to mend fractured relationships, whether it’s within families, across borders, or in the quiet, desperate attempt to reconcile with the self. By looking at stories where healing is possible, even if incomplete and imperfect, Come Together offers not just a view of the world as it is but as it might be.

As the author of the song that inspired the title of this edition wrote: “I know you, you know me. One thing I can tell you is you got to be free. Come together, right now.”

The wide program includes portfolio reviews, talks, workshops and exhibitions featuring international artists such as Alfredo Jaar, Christopher Anderson and Marion Durand, Taysir Batniji, Pia-Paulina Guilmoth, Jan Banning, Patrick Waterhouse, Federico Vespignani, Parisa Azadi, Mika Sperling, Vic Bakin, Ray Banhoff, Edoardo Delille and Giulia Piermartiri, Yael Martínez, Maria Abranches, Maya Valencia, Laura Pannack, Eleonora Agostini, and more.