Artown NOW began as a gesture to restore the city’s ritual of encounter and has grown into a contemporary art event in the public space that repairs the fractured relationship between people and the places they inhabit.

From the first edition in 2022 until today, Artown has evolved into a living, polyvocal organism, built together with over 350 artists from more than 30 countries. An international network working at the intersection of art, urbanism, research and participatory practices. Here, art is not produced to be viewed from a distance, but to be lived, reshaping the act of walking, creating microrituals of attention, and bringing the idea of the urban commons back to the center. This is what makes Artown, from the very beginning, an artivist project at its core: art with a clear position, art with responsibility, art with an explicit civic role. The first three editions functioned as a concentrated festival of 10–15 days, an intense impulse through which art entered the city. But from one year to the next, as the project grew, it became increasingly clear that this rhythm was no longer enough. The scale of the works, the number of artists, the diversity of mediums, the complexity of interventions, and the dialogue with space and community all required a different tempo.

The evolution into Artown NOW – The Urban Art Annual 2025 marked the maturity of an initiative that has outgrown its initial format. A complex platform for creation, research, and cultural regeneration, with an extended structure: one month of artistic, residency type production and five weeks open to the public, dedicated to cultural mediation. NOW means rhythm, attention, and an invitation to presence. It signifies a commitment to contemporaneity, to the idea that art is a way of writing reality. It also reflects the ambition to become a point of reference in contemporary art in Eastern Europe, a place where experiment, rigor, and community spirit meet within a still insufficiently mapped territory.

Each edition seeks out artists, illustrators, sculptors, architects and urban researchers to engage with Ploiești as a site of exploration. Through annually shifting themes, new creative voices enter into dialogue with the city, reading its layers, tensions and potential, and responding through diverse forms and practices. What emerges is not a fixed narrative, but a continuous process of discovery, where Ploiești becomes both context and collaborator.