We listen to the land and dream of a time when it might give thanks for people. During the last ice age, when our planet’s North was covered by glaciers and the Amazon was cool and dry, life survived in shrunken sanctuaries. Trees and animals clustered in geographic arks, on isolated mountains and around warm currents and hot springs.

In ecological science, these pockets of liveable space were named ‘refugia’. The tender nature we know today exists because of these places — reservoirs from which life spread back across the land as the ice retreated. Among this natural network were humans. For several hundred generations, we sheltered in rainforests on the shorelines of North Africa, starlit plateaus amid the Southern Alps, and grassland savanna of southern Asia.

Today, we recognise the need to create such spaces, where life not only survives but finds its path into an uncertain future. Do we really know how? In 2025, we can find eclectic refugia — in wild environments and urban space, in cultural spheres and spiritual realms. Following 2024’s <<Break Free>>, we conceive of a form of freedom fit for our present day: not as unconstrained, wild abandon but as the freedom to generate our own lived reality outside failing systems of power.

For five years, CIRCA has made space for art amid the chaos of the city, by pausing the daily cycle. Through our own journey of growth, we have devised an image of the role that public art can play in today’s compound crisis, as ‘a bastion of care, preservation and concern’. Today, we see that art can be generative of new ways of living, recognising that the places we inhabit amid catastrophes must not be bunkers or redoubts, but a global network of refugia, harnessing art’s ability to act as a common language.

This year, we are ready to embrace this ecosystem of empathy as the subject and substance of our work; a realm that we cultivate, as active creators. As Nicoletta Fiorucci stated this year: “Community is the new media.” What can we make when we recognise community-building as a creative practice, as worthy of veneration as the construction of monuments or the writing of literature?

Over five years of work, CIRCA has grown into a network that reaches out across arts’ co-creative capacities. In 2025, the CIRCA PIPELINE will begin delivering and the CIRCA Prize will continue. Launched by Frank Bowling, the initiative has turned the admiration of one era-defining artist’s work into tools for the coming years’ divergent creatives, in the form of £500,000 worth of free art supplies for over 100 state primary schools across the UK. Likewise, at a time when cuts to funding are forcing artists to consider if they can continue, the annual CIRCA PRIZE continues to find and support diverse, emerging artists who will be next to capture minds.

At the centre of all this, on Piccadilly Lights and broadcasting across a global network of public screens, we continue to probe new limits of meaning and communication, and search for an understanding of how this electric constellation can guide new journeys. In producing public art made of light, we find there is something else that is just as important as what is shown. In recent months, we have turned our gaze out from the screen to what is illuminated, in the street below. The work of CIRCA has always been an act of co-creation, encoding our belief that any work that calls out into public space remains unfinished until the person in the street completes it. But we are only just beginning to explore the limits of the collaborative community that comes with our responsibilities as “guardians of public space.”

Above all, as CIRCA begins each night at the new time of 20:25, we see the busy street made still. In an era blinded in an electrical storm of meaningless stimuli – where our minds make perpetual struggle to remain aware – we have come to understand this rest as a form of resistance. As the artist Tricia Hersey has urged us: “This is a time to simply stop and feel.” For a few minutes, we can read our bodies’ clues. But — as we have now for half a decade — we read each other too. A communal experience of stillness serves not only as a counter-narrative to capitalism’s compulsive drive to produce and consume but a chance to deepen the bonds of community. We rest together, as the start of the next stage. We find our desires for new worlds here.

If our mission to create communal sanctuary is clear, we must acknowledge that we do not have all the answers. We live in an unprecedented age of upheaval, an “age of migration”, when hundreds of millions face being driven from their homes in search of refuge. All the solutions do not yet exist; we must build this ship while sailing. But we know about one route to find them. As we have always, we find ourselves in between these things – survival and thriving, belief and exhaustion, disillusionment and hope. This is no bad thing – it is our way. Our nature is what Bayo Akomolafekalumafe, a Yoruba poet and philosopher, has described as “the brilliant betweenness that defeats everything, corrodes every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses out every confident line.”

Rather than a manifesto, then, this year we write an incantation. We know that we are able to make refugia, together. As societies, have won rights, averted disaster, constructed communities of care. Just this year, a campaign to free the Klamath River in the western United States succeeded and its Indigenous leaders watched the final dams torn down. This autumn the Chinook were spotted returning to an ancestral range they had been cut off from for a century. The return has set off “magnetic vibration”, says one Karuk leader. Holding close to us the possibility of failure, we find community in creating something anew, participating with growing comfort in uncertainty. We are going to have to do it. We’re going to have to find out.