This edition emerges from Timur Fork’s reflection on navigating a present saturated with information and uncertainty. Against this diffuse background, the work insists on the possibility of connection, of reaching outward, of sustaining optimism as a deliberate act. Positioned between fragility and resilience, it proposes a quiet form of resistance: to continue imagining, planning, and caring despite the noise. Here, optimism is not naive, but constructed, held together through gestures of mutual support and the persistent search for freedom.

Emerging from Amanda Lobo’s visual universe, this edition reflects on the construction of the self as both exposed and protected. Figures take shape through layers of detail and ornament, forming a kind of external armor: a surface that both conceals and safeguards an inner core. Drawing from her language of fantasy and exaggeration, the work transforms vulnerability into structure, where decoration becomes defense, and identity is held in tension between what is shown and what is kept intact.

EXIsT unfolds from João Fortuna’s investigation into the condition of the individual within cycles of acceleration and repetition. Composed through a vocabulary of fragmented visual codes, the work reflects a state where existence becomes mechanical, reduced to sequences of inputs and outputs, gestures and routines. Suspended between awareness and automatism, the piece traces a closed loop where meaning dissolves into repetition. Within this tension, between staying and escaping, permanence and rupture, EXIsT captures the fragile threshold where consciousness resists being absorbed into the system.