How will you smile?
As most of us, probably all of us, I will never forget this 2020, and the unexpected situation that has affected and still affects all of us. I used to travel a lot, for both personal and work reasons, and therefore meet a lot of people, and all of a sudden I found myself confined to my house in Bologna, alone and unable to join my family and my loved ones. I had difficult moments: many of my friends got sick, an aunt of mine I was really close to passed away and I couldn’t even go to her funeral, all my projects are at a standstill and I don’t know if and when they’ll resume. Like many others, I’ve experienced a difficult situation. I tried to find a positive side to it throughout, to, as much as possible, maintain balance and control. I considered myself lucky: I was well, I had a home, a telephone, a computer, a television, books…

I thought a lot about me, who I was, who I am, who I wanted to be, who I’d like to be. I was wondering: how will I smile, how will we smile the day all this is finished? As Fabrizio Caramagna says, smiling allows the soul to breathe. So why not restart with a smile? And that’s how I restarted: I’ve had more time to work on projects I had only just thought about and never taken on, to call people I hadn’t heard from for a while and dedicate a bit of time and attention to them, to ask myself if I could do something for who was less fortunate than me and wonder how I could be useful. We all have difficult moments, ‘crises’, in the course of our lives, what’s different this time is that we are all facing the same ‘crisis’, and this can and must bring us together. In moments like this there shouldn’t be any division, because we are all in the same boat, and, keeping that in mind, we must think about a future of the world without divisions. What world will we leave our children? What teachings will we pass on to them? What is the ‘wealth’ we want to multiply?

We have to stop thinking that the responsibility only lies with who represents us, who takes the decisions… the responsibility lies with all of us, and the pandemic has clearly shown us that: if I’m sick but I don’t feel too bad and I go out as if nothing was wrong with me, I put other people in jeopardy, I infect them, I make them sick, and I contribute to bringing the country to a halt, because with a high number of cases we might return to a total lockdown. That’s how the pandemic has demonstrated beyond doubt that we are all connected, that all our actions are closely linked to the ones of others. The responsibility doesn’t therefore lie only with our representatives, but also and mainly with us, because through our actions we can determine one result rather than another. Why not use this situation to begin a new chapter, to start over to find a balance of growth and development all together?

I work in the culture sector, which, together with the entertainment sector, has suffered the most from the pandemic, but it’s also the one that has comforted us the most during the lockdown. It’s the realm that keeps us company when we are sad and we want to be left alone as well as when we are happy and we want to shout it out to the world. It’s the realm that makes us dream, cheers us up, drives us, motivates us: just imagine going for a week without culture, books, newspapers, films, shows, exhibitions, concerts…
That’s what I thought about: about the possibility of having a world without culture, and from there I restarted, drawing my strength from what we’ve done so far and what we’ve thought of doing thanks to the Third Paradise; about the driving force of Pistoletto; about respect, responsibility, the importance of diversity; about the world that we want to create and that makes us smile, makes our soul breathe, offers us every day the beauty of the future. May this be the agenda of all our politicians, but also of all of us. Let’s restart from culture.

Bologna, 8th September 2020