Friedrich Hölderlin's renowned verse, “But where the danger is, also grows the saving power,” was not simply meant to draw us close to danger but also to acknowledge the risk that ignoring it entails. Philosophers, scientists, and journalists are constantly warning us of future pandemics, environmental disasters, and nuclear wars, among many other emergencies. The problem is not just our distrust, suspicion, and skepticism toward those who announce them but also in our inability to listen, that is, to interpret their meaning. This is probably why we could not prepare for even predictable emergencies such as the recent global crowdstrike failure (which affected airlines, hospitals, and companies around the world), which rendered our greatest emergency our inability to plan for them. Our inability to listen to warnings is a consequence of a global return to order through realism, which is symptomatic of the twenty-first century, as so many far-right populists demonstrate. This conference aims to explain the significance of our greatest emergencies through a philosophy of warnings where art plays an existential role. What emerges in contemporary art is not a representation of beauty but rather the disclosure of an invisible event to our aesthetic senses, intellectual skills, and cultural interests. Art in the twenty-first century is meant to rescue us into our absent emergencies, that is, to listen to warnings.

Santiago Zabala is a philosopher and cultural critic raised in Rome, Vienna, and Geneva. Since 2010, he has been ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, ​​where he teaches contemporary philosophy, supervises MA and Ph.D. theses, and directs the UPF Center for Gianni Vattimo's Archives and Philosophy. Before moving to Barcelona, ​​he was an Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Potsdam University and a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to an extensive speaking schedule at conferences, festivals, and biennials, Zabala is also a visiting professor at several Universities in Asia, Europe, and North America. His most recent books are Being at Large: Freedom in the

Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020), Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press, 2017), Outspoken: A Manifesto for the 21st Century (co-edited with Adrian Parr, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023), and Signs from the Future. A Philosophy of Warnings (2025). His opinion articles have appeared in The New York Times, Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other international media outlets.