The TRACCE Festival was born from the encounter between SIC12 Artstudio, the San Paolo Mental Health Centre in Rome, and the experiences of mental health services in Paris with which a process of exchange and twinning has been established.

TRACCE was not created to present art as therapy, but to explore the role that art can play in building relationships, giving form to personal experience, and creating shared spaces.Every encounter leaves a trace: an image, a word, a gesture, a work of art, a memory.

The festival gathers these traces and brings them into dialogue, creating a space where artists, people who attend mental health services, professionals, students and the public can meet beyond roles and categories.

The dialogue between Rome and Paris expands this research, bringing different experiences and practices together around a shared question: how can we build communities capable of welcoming difference and recognising in others not only vulnerability, but also possibility, desire and the capacity to create?

TRACCE is therefore a place of encounter and passage. A space where art becomes a place for listening, relationship and freedom.Because caring also means recognising what happens between people.