“…and it is precisely from this observatory, from where we ‘watch them laughing’, that our laughter began — the laughter that will bury them before they bury us — from the place where we launched our first heel, which, we are certain, has not yet landed and never will, because we are moving, proceeding forward, because movement is change, it is a ceaseless transformative and performative motion; we do not only have to change the world and ourselves, but also the galaxies and the universe.” from Woke!, 10 May 2026
It has been an incredible edition. And we do not say this as a ritual closing formula at the end of the Festival. ORLANDO welcomed an unexpected number of new people: the programmes, the encounters, the places we moved through, and the relationships that emerged gradually traced, day after day, a shared affective and political geography. The thirteenth edition of the Festival closes with a level of public engagement that surprised and moved us deeply: nearly 4,000 attendances across six days, 20 events, and guests arriving from different contexts and geographies to collectively question the sexual and affective geographies of the present. For us, these numbers speak not only of participation, but of a concrete desire to inhabit spaces of dialogue, imagination, and shared possibility.
If, as Gioele Peressini reminded us in The Shape of the Male, it is borders that create rigid identities, then we want to continue crossing them.
“After the end”, sang the performers in A Beginning. And that sentence stayed with us like a question: what happens now, after the Festival ends? How do we return to the world carrying with us the will, determination, rage and love, the radicality, the claiming of public space through speech, the strength of precarity, and all the possibilities we encountered while moving through ORLANDO? In Loud by Collettivo Amigdala, we were whispered to that every ending contains a beginning. Even the darkness that closes A Beginning can become the space from which to imagine new possibilities. We close this edition with the clear feeling that something has only just begun.
Our deepest thanks go to the artists, to everyone who took part in the Festival — as volunteers and as audience members — and to the network of collaborations, alliances, and solidarities that made all this possible: ORLANDO exists because it continues to be a space traversed and collectively built.
So thank you to everyone who participated in, shared, moved through, and made ORLANDO possible.
This year too, ORLANDO does not end here: on Sunday 17 May, the Festival Extra event Digital Bodies, Post-human Relationships will take place — a workshop curated by the collective Ippolita and promoted by GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo in collaboration with Festival ORLANDO.
We would love to hear what the Festival has left with those who moved through it: if you took part in ORLANDO over these past days, we invite you to dedicate a few minutes to completing this edition’s questionnaire. Your thoughts, impressions, critiques, and desires are part of the journey that continues beyond the Festival and help us imagine what is yet to come.
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