ESSERE-CON
September 26-27 2025How can we build or rebuild a sense of “we” in a present shaped by fragmentation, distance, crisis, and constant change?
In a time when social bonds are dissolving and reforming in new, often unstable ways, can we still speak of belonging, solidarity, and closeness? Where does the idea of collectivity live today, and in what gestures, spaces, and realities does it reveal itself?
This project isn’t about defining what community is. Instead, it’s about drawing a complex, layered portrait of experiences and stories. We seek diverse narratives: cohabitations—whether chosen or imposed—that become spaces of daily negotiation; shared rituals and habits that reinforce or reimagine relationships; spontaneous or organized movements that challenge isolation and reclaim the right to presence. We’re interested in communities that are stable or fleeting, visible or hidden, structured or informal. In forms of coexistence born from choice, need, survival, or desire. In places and their stories—settings where people and events meet, collide, and evolve together. This is an invitation to map how we live together today—a geography of “us” shaped through a growing visual archive. One built by gazes that listen, connect, and question the limits and possibilities of being present for one another. In a time marked by climate, social, and identity crises, this project aims to be a space for imagination and reflection—where the image becomes not just a document, but a tool for relationship, openness, and transformation. The invisible thread that binds us is neither linear nor guaranteed. Yet within that complexity—within the tensions and openings of our present and future—we find fertile ground for imagining a new grammar of togetherness.
ESSERE-CON was a two-day event born from an open call on the theme of living together and the common good. Through photography and video, music and local food, the collective created a shared space for meeting and reflection on the forms of community in the present, marked by crisis, transformation and loneliness. The collective exhibition, featuring seven selected projects, took place on 26 and 27 September at the Circolo ARCI La Montanina in Montebeni (Fiesole), with the special participation of photographer Chiara Fossati from Cesura's collective, as a moment of dialogue and sharing.