Rome Art Week opens its eleventh edition with an event conceived to embody, even before presenting it, the most authentic spirit of the initiative: a manifestation built on participation, dialogue and the simultaneous presence of many different voices within contemporary art.

RAW is not an art fair and does not take place in a single venue: it is a citywide art week made possible each year by the contribution of artists, galleries, institutions, independent spaces, curators and cultural professionals who, while maintaining their own identity and autonomy, choose to take part in a shared project.

The opening evening on 19 October is conceived in the same spirit.

From 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm, the presentation of the 2026 edition of Rome Art Week will intertwine with 85 Seconds to Midnight – A Wish Against Extinction, a project of performative actions curated by Roberta Melasecca. Artists active on the Roman art scene will take turns throughout the evening with interventions and performances, including participatory actions, progressively creating a single collective experience.

The project takes its starting point from the 85 seconds that symbolically separate us from midnight and from a question that concerns us all: what kind of future are we still capable of imagining?

Wars, environmental crises, inequalities and profound social transformations seem to be narrowing the space and time available to us. 85 Seconds to Midnight chooses to address this condition not through a single answer, but by bringing together different voices and entrusting art with the possibility of formulating questions, desires, projects and visions.

It is precisely this plurality that makes the project representative of the spirit of Rome Art Week: no single intervention claims to exhaust the discourse, and no artist is called upon to represent it alone. The event takes shape through the sum of individual presences, their autonomy and, at the same time, their participation in a shared experience.

The evening of 19 October thus aims to offer a representation, on a smaller scale, of what will happen throughout Rome during Rome Art Week: many individuals, many languages and many points of view that, without losing their own identity, become part of something larger.

An opening conceived not simply to mark the beginning of Rome Art Week, but to reveal its meaning.

Because, when faced with the question “what can art do?”, for eleven editions RAW has tried to offer a very simple answer: bring people, ideas and energies into connection.