​2026 - IN TIME

XII edition

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The 2026 edition, titled IN TIME, continues Flashback's research into time, not as a linear succession of eras, but as an open dimension in which past, present and future coexist and contaminate one another.

For Flashback, indeed, every work of art always speaks in the present in its encounter with the viewer. To be in time therefore means to be within one's own time, but also to move across all times, building unexpected connections between images, stories and experiences.

The Journey and the Sail

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From this perspective, the journey becomes the metaphor that guides the entire edition. Not a route with a predetermined destination, but a crossing in which finding one's direction means reading the present, welcoming the unexpected and continually altering one's course.

The sailing boat embodies this condition perfectly: it advances thanks to the wind, the currents and the ability to interpret what happens, turning uncertainty into possibility. Navigation has always accompanied the human experience.

It is the symbol of crossing, of knowledge, of the desire for freedom and of the search for new landfalls.

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Today in Piazza Bottesini

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Commissioned in Venice by Victor Amadeus II and arriving in Turin in 1731, the Savoy Bucintoro turned the Po into a stage for monarchical magnificence. More than a means of transport, it was a theatrical device, a banner of identity. Venice and Turin, then, used navigation to construct public images of power.

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The same language resurfaces today in an experience with opposite intentions: the Global Sumud Flotilla. Its civilian vessels crossed the Mediterranean to bring aid to Gaza and to challenge the naval blockade. Here too, the voyage and the mere presence of the boats at sea became a form of public action; this time, however, the sea is not an expression of power but a space of crossing in defence of life. It is from this juxtaposition that the manifesto continues its reflection on sailing as a poetic act. A sailing boat is not always the fastest or the most effective vessel. Sometimes, though, the power of the gesture lies precisely in choosing to entrust oneself to the wind – to uncertainty – to expose oneself and reveal one’s own fragility.

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The fifth billboard of Opera Viva Barriera di Milano, il Manifesto features another singular example of a sailing vessel. Though it brings together historically distant experiences, the Bucintoro pays tribute to those who chose to set out on a journey and to experience the sea not as a border but as a space in which collective responsibility can be made visible. An image born to celebrate authority thus becomes a tool for reflecting on the present. Perhaps this is precisely the possibility that art continues to offer: to free images of the past from their original meaning and make them capable, once again, of intervening in the present.

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THE SAVOY BUCINTORO is housed in the Great Juvarrian Stables at the Palace of Venaria (La Venaria Reale), as part of the exhibition La Regia Scuderia. Commissioned by Victor Amadeus II between 1729 and 1731, it was modelled on the Venetian peota, a traditional ceremonial vessel. It is the only surviving original Bucintoro in the world: the last Bucintoro of the Doges, built in the same Venetian shipyards, was destroyed by fire in 1798.

Presented by the first King of Italy to the City of Turin in 1869 and earmarked for the Civic Museum in 1873, it has been restored by the La Venaria Reale Conservation and Restoration Centre.