An interweaving of voices, experiences and responsibilities: the annual meeting of the Rebirth/Third Paradise Ambassadors, held in Biella on Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 December, was first and foremost a moment of exchange. Two days— as reported in a previous article—conceived as an opportunity for listening, dialogue and experimentation, in which the trinamical symbol was addressed not only as a sign, but as an active principle capable of guiding behaviours, decisions and projects across the different spheres of contemporary life.
With this first article in a three-part series, we explore what emerged from the very beginning, namely the meeting The Third Paradise: From Symbol to Action, dedicated to narratives and testimonies of completed or ongoing activities, observed through multiple perspectives.

Space

The Saturday morning of the annual Rebirth/Third Paradise Ambassadors’ meeting opened at Cittadellarte by first and foremost making space. Physical space, of course, within the Palazzo del Buongoverno of Biella Città Arcipelago, but above all political, educational and symbolic space for practices that are not content with being merely narrated, but demand recognition, sharing and structuring.
Symbolically positioned on the eve of Rebirth Day, the meeting immediately took on the character of a threshold: between ending and beginning, between reflection and action, between local experiences and global horizons. The words that followed one another throughout the morning did not form a single linear narrative, but rather a constellation of trajectories, all finding in the Third Paradise a shared principle of balance among differences. The first to trace this constellation could only be Francesco Saverio Teruzzi, coordinator of the Ambassadors, who not only opened the event and moderated the morning’s contributions, but also played a role of direction and accompaniment, holding vision and operativity together.

Nazarena Lanza and Biella Città Arcipelago

Following Saverio’s introductory remarks, Nazarena Lanza—Coordination and Development of the Biella Città Arcipelago Network—introduced the venue hosting the meeting, the Palazzo del Buongoverno, describing it as a political and cultural device. “Welcome to this space, which was created precisely to host people working within the world of Cittadellarte.”

The Archipelago collaborates with numerous local organisations operating in different fields, playing a connective role. “We act as connectors so that organisations can better coordinate the actions to be undertaken in the Biella area.” Each thematic island has its own history: some are deeply rooted within Cittadellarte—such as the island of learning and the educational community, which carries forward a long-term path—while others originate from autonomous initiatives that have recognised the Archipelago as a method.

Nazarena cited Tessere la salute as an example: a group of doctors and former doctors promoting a broad vision of health as a network of relationships within local communities. “They began weaving these relationships among actors across the Biella area, within municipalities, precisely to advance this idea.” The discussion expanded to islands dedicated to food, agriculture, hospitality, and living and working in mountain areas. A crucial point concerned institutional recognition: the signing of a protocol involving the Province, the Municipality of Biella and Cittadellarte, granting Biella Città Arcipelago an official role of connection and coordination.

Paolo Naldini and the Genesis of Statodellarte

Paolo Naldini, Director of Cittadellarte, highlighted the essence of the place hosting the meeting: “This space is dedicated precisely to demopractic work,” a site where thematic islands can meet freely. The mobile tables, “marked” by the Third Paradise symbol, become working devices rather than mere exhibition elements. The location itself is significant: slightly outside the former industrial complex and closer to the city centre. “It represents,” Naldini emphasised, “extension, expansion, the concrete desire for porosity and exchange.”

It is the sign of a new phase: following the recognition of Biella as a UNESCO Creative City, Cittadellarte has already—perhaps unconsciously—taken a further step toward Statodellarte. On this point, Paolo shared an anecdote about its genesis with Michelangelo Pistoletto: “We realised that Cittadellarte had become something more, perhaps a Statodellarte.” From this insight emerged the idea of a Constitution, which was further explored during the afternoon session.

Naldini then addressed the theme of space as the negation of utopia, recalling that giving a project a place means making it real. “Today we must constitute infrastructure,” he insisted, referring to permanent civil parliaments. Shared administration, in this sense, is not an abstract idea: “It is done day by day, through problems, frustrations and all the issues that must be faced.” With the revival of Cittadellarte’s office dedicated to this theme, Paolo underscored how the business world is one of the forces that effectively govern civil society. Bringing it within the framework of Statodellarte means giving it a vision, “just as was done during the Renaissance.” Cittadellarte, he concluded, continues to extend and expand—amid economic difficulties and major challenges—with the determination to make this framework operational.

The Third Paradise in Munich with Grazia Simeone and Alessandro Alliaudi

The morning continued with presentations by the Ambassadors. Grazia Simeone and Alessandro Alliaudi introduced a project carried out in Munich, initiated two years earlier. Grazia shared her work, developed through a network of relationships involving schools, students, families and associations. “We worked with around 800 students and 2,000 people,” she explained, alternating digital and analogue dimensions with hands-on workshops. Intense rhythms, continuous meetings and workshops were accompanied by strong recognition from the local community.
Alessandro instead highlighted the impact on younger participants: “Children are always the first to fully understand the Third Paradise.” He described the moment when, in front of a plenary of primary school pupils, the trinamical symbol was explained and then revealed through images of large installations around the world. “You could feel,” he recalled, “their excitement as they discovered the symbol.”

Alessandro Alliaudi and Preventive Peace in Ukraine

Saverio then invited Alessandro to recount another, more complex experience: the journey to Ukraine (described in detail in a previous article). Alessandro focused on the Jubilee of Hope, meetings with civil society, universities and institutions. He highlighted the resilience of cities, the apparent normality interrupted by air-raid alarms, and the difficulty of addressing peace in a context devastated by war. “It was not easy to speak of preventive peace in a place where war is lived every day.” In this context, art becomes a way of going beyond the present: “It allows us not to look only at today, but to open up to possible futures.”

Linda Schipani: From Discovering the Third Paradise to a Collective Exhibition

From Ukraine the narrative moved to southern Italy with the contribution of Linda Schipani. Her account intertwined biography and artistic practice: from meeting Michelangelo Pistoletto in 2019 and discovering the Third Paradise symbol, to returning to her “factory” in Messina, a former industrial site transformed into a creative laboratory. “I began playing with the trinamical symbol in the warehouses,” she recounted, “using discarded materials, experimenting, making mistakes, learning.”
During the pandemic, the Third Paradise also became an educational tool for her, capable of generating questions and answers. Linda’s personal story traversed Rebirth Day celebrations, installations across the Strait of Messina, collective exhibitions, culminating in the organisation of an exhibition entirely dedicated to the Third Paradise, involving twenty artists in the small historic village of Santa Lucia del Mela—a project that brought together territories, artists and communities.

Paola Zanini and Anna Robbino: Sustainability, Creativity and Inclusion

This was followed by a joint contribution from Paola Zanini and Anna Robbino. The Ambassadors highlighted the continuity of nearly twenty years of work, in which the Third Paradise has taken shape through educational, inclusive and participatory practices. Zanini recalled the first shared actions carried out in 2005 with Michelangelo Pistoletto and the National Consortium for Aluminium Recycling, emphasising the symbolic and concrete value of a material “recyclable infinitely, just as infinite is the energy generated by the Third Paradise sign when it is entrusted to people’s hands.”
From this founding experience emerged a path that found a stable stronghold in the Oscar Romero Institute and in the Education Department of Castello di Rivoli, capable of bringing art into schools as a space of recognition, belonging and transformation—up to spontaneous and powerful gestures such as students welcoming Michelangelo with a chorus saying, “you are one of us.”
Robbino broadened the perspective to the decade-long work carried out in the western area of Turin, weaving together sport, education and the inclusion of people with disabilities—issues often marginalised, but here embraced as the very core of the Third Paradise’s harmony. Through projects involving schools, businesses and young people with disabilities supported by tutors, inclusion has become a daily practice.

Giacomo Bassmaji and the Third Paradise Beyond Borders

The morning continued with the contribution of Giacomo Bassmaji, who retraced the path that led to the creation of the democratic artwork in Gorizia–Nova Gorica—a project whose roots can be traced back to 2024, beginning with the forum that emerged during the exhibition T3rza Terra at Villa Manin. From that initial seed, the work developed and intertwined with 2025, the year in which Gorizia and Nova Gorica became the first cross-border European Capital of Culture: a symbolically powerful context, yet one marked by historical, political and relational fragilities.
Bassmaji described how art was called upon to become a concrete gesture of crossing, starting with the decision to carry the Sphere of Newspapers beyond the border, rejecting any logic of separation. Created with schools and students, the sphere thus became the sole element capable of uniting the two inaugural parades—Italian and Slovenian—and the visible sign of a process that continued throughout the year with meetings, workshops and events.
The culmination came with the October forum: three days of dialogue hosted by the University of Gorizia, during which citizens, administrators, organisations and students worked together on themes of shared life, from urban planning to economics, from education to sport. Within this context, the project for a cross-border Third Paradise took shape, co-designed by university students as a synthesis of the various working groups: an artwork to be realised in Piazza Transalpina, exactly on the border, using materials from the dismantled wall to transform the line of separation into a circular space of encounter. Bassmaji concluded by highlighting how the process involved more than eighty organisations and major local business entities, demonstrating how art, when it becomes a collective practice, can function as a real instrument of reconciliation, shared governance and future-building.

Donatella Tuberga and the Third Paradise in Schools

Donatella Tuberga then took the floor—an educator at a comprehensive school in Druento—choosing to recount the Third Paradise “from within the school,” starting from the everyday life of those who inhabit and traverse it daily. It is within this space that her action as an Ambassador is situated, perfectly aligned—as she herself emphasised—with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s vision, in its ability to hold together interdisciplinarity, intergenerational transversality and synergy with the local territory.
In particular, the Ambassador focused on an initiative inspired by the trinamical symbol, The Shape of the Embrace (fully explored in a previous article), developed during the 2024–25 school year: “A universal, transmissible gesture, profoundly trinamical. That gesture,” she explained, “is the embrace.”

Esterina Nervino: Cittadellarte’s Sustainable Fashion in Hong Kong

From the school environment to the international arena, the morning continued with the contribution of Esterina Nervino, who presented a project intertwining art, fashion, education and sustainability on a global scale: Fashion to Reconnect, an international initiative promoted by Cittadellarte, which since 17 November in Hong Kong has brought together sustainable fashion, art and cultural exchange.
In partnership with Fondazione Pistoletto, the National Chamber of Italian Fashion and the Italian Consulate General, the project generated a constellation of actions: temporary Third Paradise installations across different areas of the city, a major exhibition featuring Italian and local brands, symposia, round tables and seminars. “Using art and fashion,” Esterina stated, “to bring people closer to a message of sustainable development was the common thread running through all the initiatives.”

Angelo Riva and Infrastructure

The tone then shifted with the intervention of Angelo Riva, who brought the discussion back to a crucial issue, already repeatedly evoked during the morning: the construction of infrastructure. Riva warned against the risk of stopping at the performative dimension—while acknowledging its value—and invited the audience to think within a radically extended temporal horizon: “How can I work today while thinking about 2100?”
His reflection wove together philosophy, politics, economics and territorial practice, moving between the theme of capability-building—set against a purely curricular notion of education—and that of the city as a complex organism. In this regard, the experience of the Third Paradise Neighbourhoods in Lecco became an emblematic case: six active sites addressing poverty, education, housing, work, food and, above all, healthcare, with particular attention to the humanisation of medicine and community-based caregiving.

Elena Guerrini: Hands in the Dough

The day then opened up to an explicitly participatory dimension with Elena Guerrini, who presented the performance Floured Hands and a Voice at the Table: a kind of laboratory using the act of making—kneading, cooking, nourishing—as a catalyst for dialogue, self-narration and shared mythobiography. The so-called “pici for peace,” prepared using only water and flour, became the symbol of a simple yet powerful action, capable of connecting people through manual labour.
Guerrini also actively involved all participants by distributing pieces of a puzzle as a tangible sign: a minimal gesture, destined to be completed only later, mirroring the logic of the Third Paradise as a unity generated through relationship.

Paolo Naldini Rewinds the Tape

The morning concluded with a further intervention by Paolo Naldini, who gathered and relaunched the many trajectories that had emerged. His reflection began with a clear observation: that we are living in a historical moment of degradation—not only political, but also ethical and value-based. Within this scenario, placing art at the centre of social regeneration and Demopraxy as an infrastructure for collaboration—“collaboration with institutions, not antagonism”—becomes essential.
Naldini did not deny the widespread sense of despair; on the contrary, he acknowledged it as grounded and real, fuelled by the collapse of reference points that for decades had ensured a sense of justice and future. Yet it is precisely here that he identified the decisive shift: from a state of despair to a new, personal and collective Statodellarte, in which hope is not abstract but practiced. “From indignation we move toward real and creative involvement,” he emphasised, pointing to the morning’s testimonies as concrete evidence of this rebound from collapse to rebirth.
A “peaceful panoply of hopes and visions” traversing territories, cultures and political orientations, united by the desire to reinhabit the world with joy, intentionality and a sense of future. With this call to work and shared responsibility, the Saturday morning session came to a close, preparing the ground for the afternoon explorations, in which Demopraxy and Statodellarte would find new forms of experimentation.

Cover photo: Pierluigi Di Pietro.