Over 100 small and large interventions found all over the city, 22 murals by renowned artists, over 60 workshops, performances, theater events, talks, film screenings, poetry evenings & concerts, 100 artists from 14 countries. This is how the 2025 edition of Artown Now can be summed up. What’s next this year for the event that changed Ploieşti’s relationship with art? «The year 2026 marks the fifth edition of the Urban Art Annual Artown Now. We are in a moment of consolidation and assumption. After four editions in which we have built a solid cultural infrastructure and a sufficiently coherent legacy, we allow ourselves to make this edition a strongly declarative one», says Livia Florea, the event’s founder. As every year, Artown returns to its «artist» roots, and the attention is directed towards a fundamental dimension of human nature: freedom. Not abstract freedom, but the freedom to exist together, coherently, in the same space. The freedom to create, to think, to go beyond one’s own limits and to reimagine the shared space. «We will map this theme together with national and international artists, but also together with fields that, at first glance, seem distant from art. We are interested in real intersections, because freedom is negotiated and built precisely in these spaces between the worlds.» Livia Florea adds that the fifth edition will place an even stronger emphasis on co-creation and collaboration. «The lesson we learned from the theme of the 2025 edition – Genius Loci – is that the spirit of place is as much something you discover as it is something you build together. We want to activate the community in new, more intimate, more participatory ways.» So that the works will be able to be found, as every year, both in the city and in the UZUC Factory in Ploiesti, but also in other alternative spaces, including through extensive collaborations in Bucharest and in the country. «But together with the community we will enter the city even more directly: in the windows, on the balconies, in the gardens, in everyday spaces.» Artown Now 5 is about adding together layers of meaning to a place and about learning and testing what freedom looks like when it is practiced, not just declared, explains the one who, passionate about fashion, but graduated in electrical engineering, laid the foundations of the project. After college, he took part in a leadership accelerator where he went on an urban regeneration project. After graduation, he also completed a master’s degree in management at the Bucharest International School of Management. And then, although he had offers to work in the engineering area, he chose art. It started in 2019 with buchARTest, an urban regeneration project that included a series of murals and a workshop with the community. In 2021 he started working for MARe (Museum of Recent Art), first in the museum shop where he was able to conclude collaborations with various artists who created for this sales space, and then in the fundraising area for exhibitions. It was also then that he enrolled in the second master’s degree at the University of Bucharest – Center of Excellence in Image Studies. «I wouldn’t be here today without him.» He also took a curator course at the Ministry of Culture, so that in 2022 the first edition of Artown will take place. «Innovation in one field comes from people coming from another field. The best curators come from fields other than art history.» Livia Florea says that it wasn’t until the 2025 edition of Artown that he came to consider himself a curator, although he already had the diploma for a long time. And all thanks to Artown. She chose to develop the event in Ploiesti not only because she is from the city, but also because she needed an internationally relevant locality. The first oil refinery in the world was inaugurated here in 1857. At the same time, we are talking about a virgin city from the point of view of art. «I had space to show my vision.» The first edition included 30 murals, over 30 visual artists, plus those who made the event possible. The following year, Artown attracted 120 artists in ten days. Then it kept growing. «Artown Festival is an urban and social manifesto for a different world, full of life and color in the urban organism. Our aim is to curate a festival that builds bridges, unites communities and showcases the incredible power of collaboration in artistic expression.» Thus, Livia Florea now defines Artown Now as an urban art annual, a public mechanism of civic imagination that transforms spectators into co-authors, changes neutral spaces into meaningful places and brings co-presence as a practice of existence in the city. «When an artistic gesture settles in a place, the place changes: it becomes holy through creation, attention and care, acquiring form, duration and promise. The artistic intervention becomes a ritual of foundation, reconfiguring the relationship between space and community and transforming fragments of the city into microsystems of meaning.» Images become instruments of collective memory – they attract, distract, summon and repel spirits, protect the place and expose it. This is how the urban pilgrimage is born, in which the work becomes a destination, and the road to it, a practice of presence. More than 20,000 visitors were received by Artown Now in 2025. Artown began as an attempt to give back to the city a ritual of meeting and became an event of contemporary art in the public space that restores the fractured connection between people and the place where they live. And the story continues. «Cities need art, and art needs courage.»