The Hevalen Festival returns in 4 days.

The second edition of the Hevalen Festival will take place from Thursday, October 12th to Sunday, October 15th in Livorno. Jacopo Simonetti, president of the Heval Association, says, “The festival aims to tell the reality that surrounds us to demonstrate that often defined utopian imaginaries are actually possible. We must continue to dream and work for change.”
Organized by the Heval Social Promotion Association, the festival will be held on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at Bottega del Caffè on Viale Caprera 35 (from 5pm to midnight) and on Sunday at Casa del Popolo on Via Mentana 13 (from 2pm to 11pm).
The festival is titled “we just want a better world” because that is the concept we want to talk about. We want to discuss beautiful ideas and experiences that surround us, the struggles that have brought improvements to society. The activists of Casa del Popolo add, “We live in an extremely individualistic context, but we want to send a counter-trend signal and become a point of reference for all citizens. It’s a place where the city’s best energies come together to build a path that starts from the bottom, from meeting and common needs. With this sentiment, we started thinking about the festival.”
We want the beautiful ideas and experiences we mentioned earlier – too often still considered “rare exceptions” – to become the new normal, our future. We want a wide network of public spaces that stimulate participation, culture, and self-education; spaces managed by the community itself, which by nature values cooperation (limiting competition only to football matches). We want to normalize the desire for change.
The first edition two years ago saw over 700 attendees in three days, in a scenario like Piazza XX, where we responded to the narrative of security with culture and participation. And it worked very well.
This edition, on the other hand, is designed to go beyond our neighborhood, where for three years now, together with Casa del Popolo, we have been carrying out mutual activities such as after-school programs and working in synergy with other associations and spaces in the “Nuevo Barrio” project, which brings together all the realities that have been working in the Garibaldi neighborhood for years.
We believe that our city needs a strong signal of rupture with the past to organize the future better. Climate change, destruction of the welfare state, and privatization in every sector are now the norm, and this scares us because it is in total conflict with what we consider the most important objective of political and social activities: thinking about collective well-being.
This festival is for all those who can imagine a different and better future, and also for those who cannot because they are alienated by the individualistic society that surrounds us.