Panoràmic Festival 2026: Burning with Desire
“Burning with desire” was not merely an intimate confession, but a declaration of what was to come: the urge to seize light and capture shadow, to hold time still, to give form to the fleeting moment, to satisfy curiosity, to celebrate the act of seeing and ensure its memory endures. From that initial spark photography was born, and with it, a new way of seeing, thinking, and inhabiting the world.
On the bicentenary of photography, rather than merely celebrating an invention, the Panoràmic festival seeks to honour the radical transformation of the modern ways of seeing. We commemorate the humble heliograph that Nicéphore Niépce captured from the window of his home in 1826; the oldest surviving photographic image. Since that view was fixed on a photosensitive surface, humanity has learned to examine itself through a formidable tool for constructing narrative, identity, memory, truth, and fantasy.
Photography and, later, cinema have not been mere technologies of representation; they have been active forces of emotional, social, and political change. They have shaped collective imaginaries, legitimised power, and fuelled resistance. They have served as instruments of proof and deception, of denunciation and propaganda, of poetry and symbolic violence. They have documented revolutions and defeats; they have furthered emancipation as well as surveillance; they have made invisible lives visible, in both poetry and control.
In assessing this dense trajectory, Panoràmic positions photography and cinema as practices of desire: the desire for memory, the desire for justice, the desire for beauty, the desire for permanence in the face of the ephemeral, the desire to exist. A desire that burns because it can never be fully satisfied, as each image generates a renewed need to look, to understand, to begin again. “Burning with desire,” then, beyond paying tribute to the pioneers and to two centuries of photographic production, is also a question addressed to the present: what makes us burn today in a world so saturated with images? What makes us burn when images not only reveal the world but also replace it?
“Burning with desire” is thus an invitation to revisit these two hundred years not through nostalgic chronology, but through the living tension between past and future. In an age saturated with images, in which artificial intelligence produces visions without body or time, what does it mean to photograph today? What does it mean, even now, to believe in the testimonial power of an image? How can we preserve the critical, poetic, and political potential of photography?
Through exhibitions, screenings, installations, and encounters, Panoràmic seeks to foster a dialogue among classics and emerging creators, archives and generative images, the darkroom and the infinite screen. The goal is not to trace a reassuring evolutionary line, but rather to make visible the continuity of conflict, the constant struggle between the image as a tool of liberation and the image as construction, as a position taken, and as a mechanism of power. Ultimately, it is an invitation to attend to all that makes us burn with the desire for images.
Moreover, this theme accompanies the celebration of the festival’s tenth anniversary, as it is reimagined under the name Panoràmic. Arts and Visual Cultures. This new designation allows us to orient ourselves toward transcending the strict domains of photography and cinema, embracing with greater ambition the full diversity of contemporary creation and visual formats.
