One question runs through our century more insistently than any other: what does it mean to be human when the pace of technological change outstrips the rhythms of human life? Artificial intelligence learns in seconds what takes us years of study; algorithms make decisions before we have had time to reflect; communication is instantaneous, innovation relentless, and the present seems to have swallowed the future.
Yet human existence continues to follow its own cadence: growth and education, love and waiting, memory and grief, the unhurried practice of democracy. These experiences lose something of their substance when compressed. We inhabit multiple temporalities – those of technology, nature and the economy, as well as those of politics and culture – which move at different speeds and struggle to find common ground.
We have chosen Time because no other concept bears so profoundly on the human condition and the transformations of contemporary life. We live in an age when everything seems to be accelerating: innovation, information, crises and opportunities. It is precisely this acceleration that makes it essential to rediscover the value of patient, sustained effort and our ability to transform lived experience into noos and awareness. Culture is where time preserves the past, illuminates the present and sets the future in motion.
Aristotle defined time as ‘the number of motion in respect of before and after’. His definition remains remarkably relevant: time emerges when consciousness recognises a before and an after, gives order to change and invests it with meaning. Today, machines quicken the transformation of the world; understanding it, and turning it into experience, judgement and responsibility, remains a human task. The defining question of the twenty-first century therefore concerns the meaning we are able to give to the time we live through, and our capacity to shape the course of change.
Literature has always taken up this task. Every novel moves across eras, gives voice to those who are no longer with us, preserves what might otherwise be forgotten and anticipates possible worlds: it stretches the present, reconstructs the past and imagines the future. From Homer to Dante, from Shakespeare to Proust, from Woolf to Borges, from Calvino to Murakami, writing both tells the story of time and creates it, allowing us to inhabit lives and times beyond our own. At a time dominated by the immediacy of information, reading may be one of the last acts of resistance against relentless haste.
Science, too, invites us to rethink our understanding of time. Relativity has shown that time depends on the observer’s frame of reference; quantum physics has challenged the notion of a single, linear sequence of events. The further our knowledge advances, the more time reveals itself as an enduring mystery. In this dialogue between scientific inquiry and the humanistic imagination, one of the most fertile intellectual exchanges of our century can take place.
Every civilisation has defined itself through its relationship with time: cyclical in the ancient world, oriented towards salvation in the Middle Ages, devoted to progress in the modern age. Our present lives under the tyranny of the instant. This raises a new question: what kind of future are we already building, and can we still imagine and prepare for one?
To place Time, in all its endless facets, at the heart of the 2027 edition means drawing different forms of expression and disciplines together to explore what permeates every aspect of life. The festival’s reflections arise from the need to understand both the speed of the changes taking place and the importance of having a vision, because what lies ahead is shaped by the ethical and civic choices a community makes.
During the edition devoted to Trust, a clear sense of hope emerged from the voices of writers, artists and scientists from around the world, grounded in the conviction that we still possess the moral, intellectual and creative resources to choose how we evolve.
We must redeem the time, as T. S. Eliot urged. The past cannot be erased: what has been may shape what is yet to come. Building the future is therefore the greatest responsibility we all share. Before it is a measure, Time is the story humanity tells itself.
