WHY Festival Returns to Florence

WHY Festival returns to Florence for its eighth edition, devoted to the theme “Vero / Falso” (True / False). The festival marks ten years of activity with four days of talks, presentations, workshops, and meetups that will bring together designers, illustrators, visual communication professionals, students, and independent organizations to reflect on the role of images at a time when the line between true and false, original and imitation, human and synthetic is increasingly hard to draw.

In an era when images can be generated, manipulated, and spread faster than they can be understood, truth is no longer just a matter of evidence, but also of trust. Images tell us what happened, whom to believe, what to fear, what to desire, and which reality we feel we belong to. In a post-truth culture, they no longer simply document reality: they compete to define it.

And as artificial intelligence begins to generate not only possible futures but synthetic pasts as well, it becomes ever more urgent to ask who holds the power to shape collective memory, and what happens when history itself becomes editable.

For its eighth edition, WHY Festival therefore turns its gaze to the power of the image, and to graphic design, illustration, and visual communication as public tools: ways of making meaning visible, legible, and shared.

The festival will explore how technology can expand human creativity, but also copy without consent, erase work, simulate experience, and turn culture into data. Between imagination and imitation, handmade and synthetic, real and constructed, it will ask what design can still defend: not only truth, but trust; not only creativity, but the human capacity to act and choose; not only images, but also the democratic spaces where we learn to read them together. These themes will be taken up in a series of talks, panels, and exhibitions with guests including L’Espresso art director Stefano Cipolla and graphic designers and educators Gianni Sinni, Stefano Rovai, and Susanna Cerri.

The program will also include the official presentation of “Visualizzare dati. 1486–2017” (Visualizing Data), the fourth volume in Lazy Dog’s Antologia di cultura grafica series, edited by Luciano Perondi and Silvia Sfligiotti, and of the new issue of Progetto Grafico, the international graphic design magazine published by AIAP, with a talk curated by Sale Grosso.

A significant part of the program will also be devoted to learning and experimentation, through a series of workshops in collaboration with AIAP, the Florentine type foundry Zetafonts, illustrator Nicola Giorgio, and activist, artist, and letterpress printer Elena Barthel. More events will be announced in the coming weeks.

The eighth edition of WHY Festival will take place in the Santa Croce and Oltrarno neighborhoods, involving several Florentine cultural venues such as MAD Murate Art District, Il Conventino, the bookshop L’Ornitorinco, and the Attalier gallery. The talks will be held mainly at MAD Murate Art District, a center for production, research, and residencies devoted to contemporary artistic practice, and at Il Conventino, a historic space in Florence’s Oltrarno now dedicated to craftsmanship, creativity, and culture.

This year, too, WHY sets out to create a meeting ground for established professionals, new generations, schools, independent organizations, and the public, putting at the center not only what design produces, but the responsibilities, languages, and questions that come with making images today. The 2026 edition of the festival is held under the patronage of AIAP – Associazione Italiana Design della Comunicazione Visiva (the Italian Association for Visual Communication Design).