This year’s topic, “The other half of the world”, developed by City Councillor for Art and Culture, Pit Formento, become a more fascinating “The Witch-Hunt”, where the witch represents a crosscultural subject involving philosophy, antropology and social studies.

Walter Benjamin’s famous sentence “There is no document of civilization witch is not at the same time a document of barbarism” inspires the reconstruction, through artists’ works, of the darkest sides of several ages.
Starting from a thinking about cultural history, curators want to focus on the “witch-hunt” as a form of barbarism that forces people to the border of society, being stigmatized and persecuted.
Our aim is to recover the importance and get back voice to history’s victims, underlining through the work of art, all that matter concerning racial discrimination, child labour, physical and psychological abuse, and to sensitize the audience about human rights issues using contemporary art as a tool to raise awareness on NGOs commitments. The concept of freedom is, in fact, a intrinsic message carried by art itself.
Artists field of investigation will space from past to present.

Angst for unknows is seen as a modern fear for witches. Fright often becomes obsession that results into rejection for who is considered as a freak or a misfit, through a negative transfer.

Societies need to purify themselves by building scapegoats to be hidden, erased or exterminated, both in the ancient ages and in the recent history.
“The Witch-Hunt” exhibition will show the attendees how a society builds its own scapegoat.

The exhibition’s guiding principle will demonstrate how charging and stigmatizing borderline people, all along history, is part of the process of suppression and repression of obsessions and phobias.
Many current issues will be raised: xenophobia, rejection of all that is foreign and unknown, especially about different social identities (ethnic, religious).
“The witch-hunt” in nowadays recognized as a modern synonymus for “persecution”.