There was a precise moment, during the evening opening of the exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto. Dalla Cittadellarte allo Statodellarte, when Palazzo Boncompagni ceased to be merely an exhibition space. It became something else: an organism crossed by bodies, gazes, conversations, and wonder. The rooms were full, densely inhabited; visitors moved slowly—not only because of the number of people—but as if they sensed that in that place art was not asking merely to be observed, but to be understood, taken on, practiced. The same vibration had run through the morning press conference just a few hours earlier: journalists were not gathered before the usual formality of a stage, but around the Tavolo Love Difference – Mar Mediterraneo (2003), one of the works on display, invited from the outset to enter physically and symbolically into the heart of the project.

The exhibition
From 3 February to 3 June 2026, as reported in a previous article, the exhibition curated by Silvia Evangelisti retraces and updates more than sixty years of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s research, placing Cittadellarte at the center as the origin, method, and operational model of a vision of art understood as social, political, and civic practice. This is not a mere retrospective, but rather a device—a term used repeatedly during the press conference—that traverses historical works, documents, installations, and projects, outlining the horizon of the Statodellarte: a collective work in progress, a possible form of civic-political organization based on demopraxy, active participation, and creativity as ethical responsibility.
The Mediterranean Table, located in the Sala delle Udienze Papali in Bologna, functioned as a symbolic and operational center. It went beyond the role of an object to contemplate, becoming a place of encounter, dialogue, and action, destined to be further activated through a public program of thematic conversations. It was here, around this mirrored table, that the speakers of the press conference took the floor, composing a polyphonic narrative that conveyed the meaning and genealogy of the project.

Paola Pizzighini Benelli — Time, fashion, rebirth: a dialogue across history
At the opening of the press conference, Paola Pizzighini Benelli, President of the Fondazione Palazzo Boncompagni, welcomed those present around the Tavolo del Mediterraneo — an explicit invitation to share a space of relationship. Hers was first and foremost a declaration of happiness and pride for an exhibition marking Michelangelo Pistoletto’s return to Palazzo Boncompagni after the 2021 exhibition Gregory XIII e Michelangelo Pistoletto: dal Rinascimento alla Rinascita, consolidating a dialogue born from the desire to open the palace to contemporary art and to the city.

Pizzighini Benelli recalled how, when she first proposed this new exhibition to Pistoletto, one element immediately proved decisive: the figure of Pope Gregory XIII and his research on the theme of time. A theme that is structural for the artist, as demonstrated by his Mirror Paintings, in which the present continuously inscribes itself within the work. To this first connection another was later added, equally powerful: the discovery that Gregory XIII was also, in a certain sense, the inventor of fashion. Bologna, capital of wool and silk, saw in that context the birth of the University of Tailors, with which a link still exists today. A historical and symbolic thread that leads directly to Venus of the Rags, an iconic work present in the exhibition, where classical beauty confronts the waste of society, opening to the possibility of rebirth.

In her speech, Pizzighini Benelli intertwined these layers—time, fashion, art, responsibility—strongly affirming the meaning of this exhibition as a path from Cittadellarte to the Statodellarte, and highlighting the presence of the Third Paradise symbol and the Mirror Paintings as key elements of the project. The memory of her first visit to Cittadellarte (particularly struck by the work Porte Uffizi), experienced as a revelation of art’s capacity to become a common denominator across different fields, concluded her speech by describing art as a generative force in which differences can meet and generate something new.

Silvia Evangelisti — Sixty years of work as a single thread: art as collective force
Curator Silvia Evangelisti then spoke, immediately clarifying a fundamental point: this exhibition “has a meaning.” It is “another exhibition,” even though it is dedicated to the same artist, because what has been staged is not simply a sequence of works but the coherence of a thought spanning sixty years of practice. At its center is the research on identity and the presence of the master within the phenomenological reality of the world, which led Pistoletto to discover the mirror as truth: the mirrored surface contains all existing reality, without selection or mediation.

Evangelisti described the exhibition as a visual and documentary narrative of the most important guiding thread in Pistoletto’s research: the conception of art as a powerful tool for collective activation, capable of crossing all disciplines and putting plural action into practice. Multiplication, recurring in many of the artist’s works, is not only a formal element but the expression of a radical trust in art’s strength as a collector of energies and as a means for changing the world.

For the first time, this intention emerges in such an explicitly didactic and legible way: from the 1960s and the experience of Lo Zoo, when Pistoletto opened his studio to do things together, to Cittadellarte, and then to Love Difference, which gave name and form to the Tavolo del Mediterraneo. Evangelisti concluded her presentation of the story behind the exhibition by arriving at the Third Paradise and the works on artificial intelligence, composing a narrative that is also the story of recent Europe, seen through the gaze of an artist who has never closed doors but has always invested in collectivity.

Paolo Naldini — From the city to civitas: toward the Statodellarte
The Director of Cittadellarte brought the discussion back to the conceptual origins of the project, returning to the year 2000, when he personally became part of the “Pistoletto family” in Biella. It was then that Michelangelo Pistoletto explained to him the meaning of the word Cittadellarte: on one hand the “citadel,” a place of protection, freedom, and autonomy for art; on the other the “city,” a space in which this freedom takes on the responsibility of connecting with all human activities.

Naldini revealed how, from the outset, he also recognized in the name the root civitas: the idea of an expanded, global culture. The title of the exhibition marks an awareness of a path taken step by step: one of the most important stages is the establishment of the Third Paradise Embassies, representing the practical commitment of individual vocations. Ambassadors “sent from a future we want,” from a harmonious world, “as if the future itself were showing us the way.” From here comes the passage to Biella, capital of wool and Pistoletto’s birthplace, also designated a UNESCO Creative City, choosing creativity as its identity-driving force, with the Third Paradise as symbol of the candidacy.

Thus, for Naldini, arriving at the Statodellarte means recognizing that the time has come to take a further step. And if one speaks of a State, a constitution is needed, as initially agreed between Naldini and Pistoletto. The State of Art then becomes a definition of the point we have reached, starting from a “ruthlessly lucid” analysis of reality, similar to that of the mirror, which softens nothing. For Naldini, the State of Art is above all the idea of a creative state, not sedated nor sedative, but generative. The crisis of representative democracy finds here a response in practice: demopraxy, shared action as a form of governing complexity.

Michelangelo Pistoletto — An open path
With his characteristic clarity, Michelangelo Pistoletto wished to clarify that the State of Art is not yet a concluded declaration. The exhibition, beginning with its title, tells of a journey, not a definitive point of arrival. It is necessary to create organisms, forms of participation, a citizenship of the State of Art. In this process, art is never limited: it includes all the components necessary for the functioning of a society. “One day,” Pistoletto stated, “there will be an official declaration; today we are here to tell the path that leads there.”

Responding to a question from Francesco Saverio Teruzzi, coordinator of the Rebirth/Third Paradise ambassadors, about why art must move all of this, Pistoletto retraced the historical role of the artist: from communicator of religious and political thought, almost a “journalist” in service of the palace, to the turning point of the Renaissance and the advent of photography, which freed art from the function of representing reality. With modern art, the artist found himself expressing the maximum of individuality, but risking solitude. From this crisis, for the master, arose the need for an undeniable sign: existence itself. The mirror thus becomes an infinite theater of reality, in which we are all actors and co-authors of what exists.

Chiara Belliti — The Table as a space of welcome and activation
The press conference concluded with a focus on the public program—a series of thematic meetings scheduled around the Tavolo del Mediterraneo—curated by Chiara Belliti. She presented the three planned events, each open to the public and involving different participants, transforming the Table into a point of welcome and dialogue. The first, on 10 February, will be dedicated to the relationship between art, spirituality, and religion, with Michelangelo Pistoletto, Francesco Monico, and religious representatives engaged in building an interreligious constitution for preventive peace. This will be followed by a meeting on ethics, politics, and artificial intelligence (date to be defined), and finally, on 14 March, a table dedicated to sustainable fashion as cultural and social responsibility.

As Paolo Naldini recalled in closing, Cittadellarte does not settle for the exhibitionary: it works on the device, on activation. It is in this shift—from the work to the process, from the exhibition to action—that art returns to being the center of a possible transformation.