RAW for Peace is a special project connected to Rome Art Week, conceived as a citywide day of initiatives dedicated to the value of peace, dialogue, and coexistence through the languages of contemporary culture.

It stems from the belief that culture is not merely a space for representing the present, but a concrete tool for relationship, listening, imagination, and transformation. In a time marked by wars, conflicts, polarization, and social fractures, culture can still create opportunities for encounter, open alternative visions, and generate closeness among people, communities, and different sensibilities.

For this reason, on Friday, April 24, 2026, on a date strongly linked to the theme of peace and international cooperation, galleries, artists, and curators registered with Rome Art Week will be invited to create a large constellation of widespread events that may take place from 10 in the morning until midnight, distributed across the territory and united by a shared ideal horizon: affirming the role of culture as an instrument of peace.

RAW for Peace is addressed exclusively to the active community of Rome Art Week, which today includes more than 1,000 participants among artists, curators, and exhibition spaces. It is precisely this broad, plural, and already well-established network that represents the strength of the project: a widespread cultural community capable of activating itself simultaneously, in different places, with different languages, while maintaining a shared vision.

RAW for Peace is not limited to contemporary art in the strict sense. While rooted in the relational and project-based system of Rome Art Week, it opens its field of action to diverse and complementary forms of expression: visual arts, poetry, literature, music, theatrical performances, readings, meetings, participatory actions, moments of reflection, and interdisciplinary practices. This openness does not represent a dispersal of the project, but its natural evolution: peace, in fact, cannot be expressed through a single language, but through a plurality of voices, gestures, sounds, images, and words.

The goal of RAW for Peace is to transform the Rome Art Week network, for one day, into a large civic and cultural laboratory, accessible and widespread, in which each participant can contribute according to their own identity, language, and sensibility. No single format is required, but rather a coherence of intentions. Each event may take different forms: an exhibition, a poetry reading, a public conversation, a musical performance, a lecture, a theatrical action, a temporary installation, an open workshop, a listening moment, a collective sharing. What unites all initiatives is the desire to place an authentic reflection on the theme of peace at the center.

In this context, peace is not understood as an abstract or decorative concept, but as a cultural practice. Peace is the ability to listen without simplifying. It is the possibility of inhabiting disagreement without turning it into violence. It is an exercise of imagination against the fatalism of conflict. It is the construction of contexts in which plurality does not become a threat but a richness. It is the protection of human dignity, differences, freedom of expression, and mutual responsibility. Culture, when it is alive, accessible, and shared, can make these processes visible and help strengthen them.

RAW for Peace also seeks to reaffirm the public value of artistic and cultural communities. Galleries, artists, and curators are not merely operators within a sector, but active subjects in the construction of public discourse. Through their work, they can generate spaces of awareness, raise questions, activate relationships, and produce meaning. In this perspective, the project presents itself as a collective gesture: not a thematic program imposed from above, but a widespread cultural mobilization based on the voluntary participation of an already existing and recognizable network.

The initiative is founded on some essential principles.

First: peace is a cultural theme, not only a political or diplomatic one.

Every lasting transformation also passes through the education of the gaze, of language, and of the imagination.

Second: the plurality of languages is a value.

Visual arts, writing, music, performative speech, and theatre can contribute, in different ways, to the construction of a shared experience.

Third: the territory is part of the work.

RAW for Peace develops in a widespread form, enhancing the relational geography of Rome Art Week and activating different places as temporary cultural outposts.

Fourth: participation is an act of responsibility.

Taking part in RAW for Peace means contributing publicly to a common reflection, offering the public opportunities for encounter and meaningful content.

Fifth: culture can still have an impact on the present.

Not because it can resolve conflicts on its own, but because it can create the symbolic, emotional, and relational conditions for imagining a different coexistence.

RAW for Peace therefore aims to be at once a cultural project, a collective gesture, and a declaration of intent. A cultural project, because it places at the center the quality of the proposals, the freedom of languages, and the value of research. A collective gesture, because it invites a broad community to move on the same day around a common theme. A declaration of intent, because it clearly states that culture is not marginal in difficult times, but necessary.

For one day, more than a thousand protagonists of the Rome Art Week network will be able to contribute to a shared map of events, actions, openings, readings, concerts, performances, and meetings. A map that does not celebrate peace rhetorically, but puts it to the test in public space through dialogue, sensibility, participation, and creation.

RAW for Peace is an invitation to make culture an active place of relationship.

It is an invitation to transform artistic presence into civic presence.

It is an invitation to restore to the city a fabric of signs, voices, and visions capable of opposing violence not with empty slogans, but with real practices of listening and sharing.

On April 24, 2026, the Rome Art Week community is called to express itself as a conscious, open, and responsible cultural network. Not to offer a single answer to the theme of peace, but to build a common space in which that word may once again become alive, questioned, explored, and made concrete.

RAW for Peace is this:
a citywide day, a community in action, a constellation of events, a cultural stance.
Culture as an instrument of peace.