This June, BAZA Youth Center in Ljubljana turned into festival ground for the last PASS edition. Artists, young people, skaters, dancers, creatives and visitors from around Ljubljana came together and, over two days, filled the space with murals, performances, workshops, music and fashion, plus a lot of new connections that started right there on the spot.

More than 400 visitors made their way through the event. What they found was a public square doing something it does not usually get to do: instead of just being a place people go through on their way somewhere else, it became a place where people stopped, talked, made things together and worked side by side with strangers who quickly stopped being strangers.

This was the closing chapter of PASS, the last of three festivals after Belgrade and Skopje. Across all three cities, the idea stayed the same: give street art the room to open up conversations that are not always easy to have – about migration, about prejudice, about what holds a community together, and let people work through them by making something with their hands rather than just talking about it. Ljubljana kept a big mural growing across the festival days, ran workshops that anyone could join, brought artists and visitors together for open conversations, and mixed in skate and BMX sessions alongside the music and dance acts, so there was always more than one way in.

The festival stayed true to what it set out to be from the start: open and free, with no one standing on the sidelines. Young people, people with disabilities, migrants, and members of ethnic and cultural minorities were part of the invitation from day one, not an afterthought.