The initial motivation for the UNIDEE residency goes back to my work from the 1960s, the Mirror Paintings, in which art opens up to society, and the viewer becomes a living part of the work. For me, extending this artistic activity to the interpersonal relationship was inevitable. Later, I moved on to the Minus Objects, which represent the multiplicity of individual expressions and, as a personal phenomenon, I created different works, thus excluding the possibility of being a commercial brand. In 1967, I opened my studio to the participation of artists from all disciplines: poetry, music, literature, film, and this is how The Zoo was born. The Zoo meant leaving institutions, as animals do, and entering the living space of society: streets, squares and places not intended for art. Art, therefore, became a means of collaboration, interaction, and active life in society.
With Cittadellarte, interactive art merges with every area of common life: politics, economics, religion, and behaviours. I founded Cittadellarte in 1991, in a former factory, as a place intended to connect art and society for a new vision of non-traditional art, where art takes on a proactive, organisational and ideational value in every field, always remaining at the centre. I started here in Biella in parallel with my commitment at the Academy of Vienna, where, in 1990, I was invited as a professor to bring something new, in the wake of the Secession of the 1920s, conducted by artists who had escaped from the traditional academy to make room for a new and open art. Cittadellarte was created as a kind of further Secession aimed at disrupting the traditional structure of the academy.
I called my art residency programme ‘the University of Ideas’ (UNIDEE) because it is from ideas that everything starts and develops. The concept of UNIDEE was born around 1995, after the Progetto Arte manifesto of 1994, which described the reasons why Cittadellarte and the University of Ideas were founded. It was inevitable that, in order to carry forward a place that would make art interact in all sectors of society, there had to be a school. A school intended as preparation to make people able to bring art into every field. We, therefore, developed the concept of training to create people capable of building new societies.
Cittadellarte is a research centre that translates into actual achievements in society. So much so that Biella has been recognised as ‘Biella Creative City’ by UNESCO thanks to Cittadellarte’s activities, including those of Accademia Unidee.
I have directly and closely experienced the University of Ideas since its beginnings, spurring artists on towards responsible creation and seeing results that also brought me forward. No one was proposing to do things I had already done or was doing. They were all creating something new: this is the school of the ‘not-yet-done’.
Photo by Margarita Vasquez Ponte.
Since the school was not teaching something known or tried and tested in the academic system of art education, the true meaning of the work emerged when these young people tried their hand at something original compared to the art system. I have continued to stimulate the creation not of something repeated in the traditional sense but of a tradition that modifies and develops. This development happens by stimulating creative activity towards something that is not yet there through the relationship between those who conduct the teachings, who know the world and the field in which they operate, and the artists.
This skill must be spread throughout society so that each person becomes creatively responsible.
What do I wish for UNIDEE? If I had to wish UNIDEE something, it would be humanity. That in the next 25 years, humanity will change and move closer to what I now call Preventive Peace, that is, the ability to overcome the boundaries we have built that keep us in constant conflict. We have used our intelligence to feed on other human beings, taking rapacity to unimaginable levels, far beyond animal rapacity, because it is wanted by man on man.
UNIDEE’s activities include initiatives of social transformation that embrace various fields through a new network of political, economic and cultural activities. The school develops and progresses along with the practical achievements, flourishing in the practice itself. This approach allows theory and practice to be integrated, making the training more concrete and applicable to reality. UNIDEE participates in this laboratory of transformation in synergy with Cittadellarte’s activities, such as the collaboration with the United Nations, starting with sustainable fashion, and the project Città Arcipelago, as concrete examples of responsible transformation. These paths offer students the opportunity to understand and create the realities they are imagining.
This is my wish for the next 25 years of UNIDEE: that Cittadellarte may be the school of a new civilisation. Not just a school of art but a school of civilisation. Civilisation is made up of all the trades and feats humanity manages to achieve.
