Unlike previous years, where the theme has been suggested through specific claims and messages, for its 4th edition, the FOC wants to share its main theme and thus make a letter of intent to start a shared journey, a discourse that will be enriched over the years. We do not know where the future will take us, every year is more unpredictable and more complex, we do not know if in the end it will lead us to the happy modernist fable of technological utopia, to the postmodern myth of dystopian collapse or if it will open perspectives that we have not yet thought of (…we hope!).

Many hitherto unexplored and yet interconnected windows are opening. We are moving from an era where the functionalist specialization of the human being was the immovable foundation for progress, to a more flexible, multidimensional and collaborative society, which is oriented towards integration, interconnection and adaptability in a globalized and technologically interdependent world without neglecting emotions, empathy, critical thinking and creativity.

In this context, opportunities for progress are not limited to specialization in a single field, but multiply as humans are able to move, learn and collaborate across multiple dimensions.

The Festival of Consciousness wants to be the cradle of these crossroads, where interdisciplinarity, open innovation and holistic approaches are presented as the paths to accompany our evolution, and create contexts to cultivate knowledge and inspiration and thus enable future transformations.

To begin to imagine the future and to manifest it from love, compassion and communion with other Natural beings, forces us to open our minds, to remove barriers to thought and to question all (…or almost) those truths that derive from past times, systems taken for granted and silently accepted: this means to evolve the models of reality in which we live (personal, relational, social, economic, political, scientific, religious, etc…).

We know that this is a slow process that has already begun and that we are witnesses and, at the same time, protagonists. We are living the first steps of a more conscious humanity – with all that it means and entails – that seeks deeper and more authentic levels of connection. Like Ardi, Lucy and the other 400 hominids, we are moving into new territories and new ways of seeing, living and feeling the reality around us, and it is thanks to this intrinsic human capacity to explore, experiment, analyze, understand and continuously search that we are evolving.

We are still lacking. The saber-toothed tiger of war, the mammoth of capitalism and the dodo of smart TV force us to be immobile, alert and distracted all the time without being able to focus on ourselves. Now is the time. We need to stop, breathe and ask ourselves fundamental questions and look from other perspectives to rethink ourselves as conscious beings.

The only way we have to make it our starting point is to open a space where there are no limits, no boundaries, where anything goes. It is a space, perhaps a void, where there are no barriers that delimit the boundaries, because if there are, we do not know them yet, it is the space of Nothingness/Everything. It is the primordial creative space, a space that is not even space, and not even time, if we think about it. It is a metaphysical space. And when we are there, the problem of identity no longer exists, because I am that space, my identity becomes infinite possibilities, my gaze is no longer 100º, but 360º and more.

Does that mean I am timeless?

Aerospace? Unbounded?

is it where I place my gaze that my reality takes shape?

…that changes a few paradigms.

But, without going there, let’s look at those paradigms:

What defines you in this world? Your name, your role, your job?Let’s take your name, for example:

are you your name or do you have your name?We didn’t choose it, by the way.

Your role, we talked about it:

are you a parent, son, mother, daughter or do you have that role?

Your work…

So if I am timeless,

aerospace,

without limits, there is no single reality,

I am not my family role,

I am not my job,

I am not a name (which I did not even choose)….

I am no longer what I am.

I AM NOT WHAT I AM is the invitation to investigate the possibility of broadening our gaze, to open new scenarios, to leave this reality and connect with our timeless and atemporal self. To remove the filters to our self, to open doors, to expand our horizons and go beyond.