Here's the Tolerance Project: the exhibition that unites border towns

As part of Agrigento 2025, Italian Capital of Culture, and thanks to the collaboration between the Valley of the Temples Archaeological and Landscape Park in Agrigento, the Cizerouno association of Trieste, and the ATS Pelagies, Lampedusa is hosting a powerful and symbolic artistic event: the arrival of the Tolerance Project, an international initiative conceived by designer Mirko Ilić, which has already traveled to over 40 countries with more than 200 exhibitions. Beginning July 25, the façade of the Pelagie Islands Archaeological Museum will feature monumental banners reproducing posters created by graphic designers from around the world. Each artist has been invited to interpret the word "tolerance" in their native language, creating a visual and multilingual exploration that explores, through shapes and colors, the profound meaning of coexistence, empathy, and shared dignity.

The creatives will come from South Africa, Ecuador, Uruguay, Lebanon, Ghana, Syria, Jordan, France, Serbia, Switzerland, Croatia, and Italy, and will brighten the central Via Roma. The Tolerance Project in Lampedusa will be a distributed installation, constructed from the island's topography, with banners and flags featuring posters that will accompany residents and visitors. An open-air gallery, it intertwines the project's aesthetic with one of the island's busiest areas.

A project that connects geographically distant realities yet united by similar border dynamics: places where history, culture, and migration intertwine and generate new forms of coexistence. The Lampedusa leg of the project, strongly desired and supported by the Archaeological and Landscape Park of the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, is a preview of the one that will take place in Agrigento in the fall of 2025, where the Fondazione Agrigento will host the Tolerance Project as part of its official calendar, helping to strengthen the dialogue between art, culture, and plural identities. In Trieste, during the same period and as part of the twelfth edition of the Varcare la Frontiera festival, organized by Cizerouno and made possible thanks to the support of the Autonomous Region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the project will unfold in the heart of the city's most multiethnic neighborhood, Barriera Vecchia.

Finally, Gorizia will also be a stop on the project, thus creating a wide-ranging cultural connection between GO! 2025 – Nova Gorica – Gorizia, European Capital of Culture 2025, and Agrigento 2025, Italian Capital of Culture. "The Archaeological Park," comments Director Roberto Sciarrata, "supports this initiative, which will not only further enhance an institution we hold dear—the Pelagie Archaeological Museum, which has attracted increasing numbers of visitors since its reopening following its new layout—but also because it represents a way to transform the concept of the Frontier from something negative, a place of deprivation of rights and closure to the world, into an opportunity for social and cultural enrichment. And Lampedusa, certainly, from this perspective, represents an international example that must be recognized and celebrated with initiatives of this kind."

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