Ten years is a long time, but for Paw Chew Go Festival, they seem to have flown by. Since 2014, this Milan-based event dedicated to illustration and visual arts has become a cornerstone of the Italian creative scene. On the weekend of November 8 and 9, 2025, the spaces of BASE Milano will once again fill with colors, paper, prints, live performances, and talks that place the image at the center — as language, as voice, as a collective gesture.
To celebrate its tenth edition, the festival changes its skin — or rather, its color. The 2025 visual identity turns “watermelon,” a choice that is not only aesthetic but also political, born from the desire to reflect the tensions, hopes, and debates running through Italy’s creative community today. As founders Fortuna Todisco and Federico Demartini explain, the new look also incorporates the colors of the Palestinian flag: a simple yet powerful gesture meant to open conversations, not create divisions.
This approach reaffirms the true nature of Paw Chew Go: a grassroots festival that, over the years, has used illustration to tell stories of fragility and to build spaces of inclusion and solidarity. It’s a celebration, of course — but also a way to speak out, to take a stand through images.
This year’s program is extensive. Over 120 illustrators and creative studios will fill the market with original works and publications. The main exhibition will be dedicated to Gio Pastori, with Vernice Paciugo — a site-specific project that transforms BASE’s room 2100 into an ocean of dolphins, waves, and shipwrecks. A journey through collage, light, and sound that reimagines the sea as a place of pleasure, danger, and metamorphosis.
The stage will host well-known names and new voices from the contemporary visual and music scene: Elena Salmistraro in conversation with Alessandra Modarelli, a performance by Davide Toffolo with the Istituto Italiano di Cumbia, and then Sara Maragotto and Sarah Mazzetti, Eliana Albertini, Giulia Cellino, and Martina Sarritzu with the show Morta mia nonna, mi sono innamorata. Rounding out the schedule are thematic talks curated by VolumebK, performances by Sara Leghissa & Taquito Jocoque in collaboration with Farout Festival, and DJ sets in the outdoor courtyard.
There’s also space for younger visitors with Piccoli Paciughi, the festival’s kids area curated this year by Stefania Sbrighi, who brings to life a playful, child-friendly horror universe. Creative workshops and activities led by artists such as Maragotto and Zosia Dzierżawska complete the experience.
As always, Paw Chew Go looks beyond its own borders. This year, it will support Doctors Without Borders with a donation for every ticket sold, and will strengthen its collaboration with Recup, an organization fighting food waste, which will distribute recovered fruits and vegetables during the festival.
Paw Chew Go is more than just an event — it’s a way of being together, of recognizing one another through imagination and beauty. A meeting point between creators and viewers, between printers and dreamers. After ten years, it remains one of the most vibrant and necessary events in Italy’s visual landscape — and perhaps one of the most genuine.
