What do twenty-year-olds dream of today? What stories move through their bodies, what words, what images? On the occasion of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival, the Istituto Europeo di Design presents The Dreamers, the first chapter of the three-year project Ti vorrei dire, created in collaboration with Gallerie d’Italia – Intesa Sanpaolo. A collective and sincere photographic narrative, The Dreamers comes to life on Thursday, April 17, 2025, from 3:00 to 5:30 PM, at Gallerie d’Italia – Torino, in Piazza San Carlo 156.

The Dreamers is a living archive, a space for intergenerational dialogue and self-expression, where twenty-one photography students from IED’s campuses in Turin, Milan, and Rome offer an intimate and multifaceted look at their generation, disrupting stereotypes and revealing the complexity of youth through the power of images.

The works on display navigate bodies and contexts, memory and transformation, conflict and connection—unfolding a poetic tension suspended between vulnerability and resilience. Each portfolio is enclosed in a box designed by students of Visual Communication Design at IED Florence: a simple, yet deeply symbolic object. The table that holds it—an everyday, universal presence—becomes a stage and a space for exchange, where images are opened to view and discussion, triggering a participatory performance that involves the public, the artists, and figures from the cultural and museum world.

“Each portfolio physically enters a process of exchange,” explain the project curators and IED Photography coordinators Giulia Ticozzi, Carlotta Cattaneo, and Daria Scolamacchia. “It’s not just about exhibiting, but about sparking a conversation: students are invited to move, to interact with the space and those within it, encouraging a collective discourse where every body—expert or simply curious—becomes an active participant.”

The result is a fluid, plural narrative, where each photographic project becomes both mirror and refraction of what it means to be young today: in insecurity and desire, in emotional tensions, in daily struggles and identity transformations. A body of work that, in the intimacy of a gaze, reveals an entire relational and social universe.

The Dreamers is not just an event, but a growing archive—a visual laboratory that expands over time, enriched by new stories. It’s an invitation to pause, to observe, to listen. And perhaps, to remember what it means to dream.