Taobuk 2027: Exploring Time

For the first time in history, humanity commands technologies capable of transforming the world, even as it confronts a profoundly different experience of time. Artificial intelligence learns in moments what once took generations to master; algorithms anticipate decisions; innovation continually reshapes the relationship between knowledge and reality. Meanwhile, human life continues to unfold according to its own rhythms: growth and education, waiting and love, commitment and farewell.

It is from this divide between the speed of change and the deeper cadence of human experience that the 17th edition of Taobuk draws its central theme: Time, the primordial, ever-present dimension in which history, memory and imagination take shape. Having explored the great landscapes of human relationships – The Last Walls, The Others, Identity, Borders – and fundamental values such as Freedom, Truth and Trust, the festival now opens a different perspective, moving from the boundaries of space to the invisible fabric of becoming.

‘We have chosen Time because no other concept bears so profoundly on the human condition and the transformations of contemporary life,’ says Antonella Ferrara, founder and Artistic Director of Taobuk. ‘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.’

An ancient and universal word, Time offers a lens through which to understand both the ‘short twentieth century’ and our own. Taobuk, an international and multidisciplinary festival that sets literature in conversation with the arts, science, philosophy, economics, technology and geopolitics, will examine the great questions of our age in this light: the artificial intelligence revolution, the climate crisis, longevity, armed conflicts, the transmission of knowledge, cultural heritage and the future of democracy. Every challenge raises a question about the relationship between what we have been, what we are and what we might become.

Literature has always sought to transcend the limits of time. Storytelling stretches moments, revisits them, layers them upon one another and restores a voice to what might otherwise be lost, while dystopian fiction anticipates possible worlds. As early as the Homeric epics, the bard’s song served as a treasury of memory: epic poetry rescued people and their deeds from oblivion, entrusting them to the enduring power of words.

Across the centuries, writers have never ceased trying to illuminate the mystery of time. Proust showed how a fragment of the past can bring an entire life back into focus; Borges perceived the passage of time as an intricate web of infinite possibilities and paths; Virginia Woolf explored the distance between clock time and inner experience; Calvino looked towards the future through the power of imagination.

In the garden of Burnt Norton, T. S. Eliot asks whether what we perceive as a succession of yesterday, today and tomorrow might in fact be simultaneous and unchanging. In doing so, he gives poetry one of its most profound visions of humanity’s journey through the world: the need to redeem time, restoring meaning to the flow of moments.

‘In an age dominated by the immediacy of information, reading may be one of the last acts of resistance against relentless haste,’ observes Ferrara.

Science, too, has radically transformed our understanding of reality. Relativity in physics, together with developments in biology and neuroscience, has challenged the notion of time as an absolute, linear measure, revealing a complexity that encompasses both the universe and individual perception. By bringing the humanities and sciences into dialogue, Taobuk opens one of the most fertile areas of intellectual exchange of the twenty-first century.

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. The question facing our century, then, concerns the meaning we are able to give to the time we live through, and our capacity to shape the course of change when the present seems to have swallowed the future.

‘To place Time, in all its endless facets, at the heart of this edition means drawing different forms of expression and disciplines together to explore what permeates every aspect of life,’ concludes Antonella Ferrara.

‘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.

‘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.’