31 December 2025
There is a moment, after the Meeting ends, when the work does not stop but changes pace. The urgency fades; the tight shifts and pressing deadlines are over. What begins instead is a time for storytelling: telling one another what happened, what struck us, what set each person in motion. The briefing on December 19 was exactly this—not a departmental report, but a weave of voices, shared experiences, and people who continued to meet in the months after the Meeting because something in that experience asked to be taken up again and carefully held.
Architects and designers who, after working side by side for weeks, choose to meet again to understand what truly happened while they were building an exhibition. Young people who, through the effort of a summer without holidays, discovered a new way of returning to their everyday work. Volunteers from general services who pass on responsibility without disappearing, showing that responsibility is not about ownership but about accompaniment. Cashiers, cleaning staff, people from different backgrounds and countries who find themselves working together and discover they can share not only a task, but also the weight and meaning of what is happening in their lives.
Across all these stories, the same point keeps returning: the Meeting is not just something you “do,” but something you take part in with your whole self. It is not an event to be completed, but an experience that generates relationships, responsibility, and the desire to return. Some arrive for the first time and discover energies they thought they had lost. Others have been coming for thirty years and realize they are still being set in motion. Some choose to be there even in times of grief, because they recognize that precisely there a presence greater than themselves can emerge.
From this arises a question that runs through all the contributions, even when it is not explicitly voiced: why is the Meeting a good for the world? Not because it offers easy answers or simple comfort, but because it creates real spaces of encounter, where very different people learn to work together, to let go of something of their own so that something truer can emerge. A place where creativity does not assert itself against others, but grows through dialogue. A place where work, volunteering, and financial support are not isolated functions, but participation in a shared endeavor that generates meaning.
This is why so many choose to continue supporting it. Not to defend a tradition or replicate a model, but because they recognize that what happens at the Meeting makes them more alive, more responsible, more free. Supporting the Meeting means allowing this space of freedom and construction to continue to exist, so that others may have the same experience, and so that a good born of encounter can once again become an opportunity for good for many.
Ultimately, what emerges from these faces at work is both simple and radical: the Meeting continues because, year after year, there are people who discover that it is worth stepping into the game. Not to repeat something already seen, but to allow themselves to be moved once again.
