This Tuesday, at Palazzo Boncompagni, the exhibition Dalla Cittadellarte allo Statodellarte by Michelangelo Pistoletto opens up to a public and shared dimension with the launch of a cycle of roundtable discussions centered on the work Il Tavolo del Mediterraneo. This moment marks the beginning of a series of meetings curated by Chiara Belliti, conceived to accompany the exhibition project with opportunities for listening, dialogue, and collective reflection.

Within the exhibition, on view until June 3, 2026, this cycle of meetings delves into the themes embedded in the very title of the exhibition: the transition from Cittadellarte to Statodellarte, signaling an expansion of the role of art, called upon to engage directly with the social and civic dimensions of the present.

The inaugural meeting, Arte, Spiritualità e Religione, curated by Francesco Monico, places interreligious dialogue at the center as an urgent and timely issue. The first roundtable brings together representatives of different spiritual and religious traditions—Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—in a dialogue that acknowledges differences as an integral part of the exchange. Participants include Swamini Shuddhananda Giri, Filippo Scianna, Rabbi Joseph Levi, Father Antonio Spadaro, and Imam Nader Akkad. The discussion will be moderated by Monico himself and will take place in the presence of the founder of Cittadellarte.

This first roundtable is part of the broader Interreligious Table for Preventive Peace through Art, developed by the Spirituality Office of Fondazione Pistoletto and previously articulated within the project UR-RA – Unity of Religions / Responsibility of Art, presented last October 31 at the Reggia di Monza. This is a path that does not merely represent dialogue among religions, but activates it as a living, preventive practice capable of shaping the collective imagination and influencing forms of civic coexistence.

To further explore the significance of this first meeting, the role of the roundtables within the exhibition, and the continuity with the path initiated by UR-RA, we interviewed Francesco Monico. Below is the full interview.

“Arte, Spiritualità e Religione” inaugurates the public program with an interreligious meeting. Why begin from this point? What kind of horizon does this first roundtable open in relation to the subsequent events of the program?

Francesco Monico: The meeting of February 10 of the Interreligious Table for Preventive Peace, held in Bologna at Palazzo Boncompagni within the exhibition “Michelangelo Pistoletto, Lo Statodellarte”, curated by Silvia Evangelisti, with the organization of the meetings entrusted to Chiara Belliti and the invaluable exhibition management work of Alessandro Lacirasella, addresses one of the decisive questions of our time: what happens to ethics when the relationship between things is mediated by artifice.

The meeting Arte, Spiritualità e Religione is born in direct dialogue with UR-RA – Unity of Religions / Responsibility of Art, the anthological exhibition on spirituality curated by myself and hosted at the Villa Reale in Monza throughout 2026, and constitutes an essential conceptual opening of that project. It is not a collateral event, but an operative gesture within a path that intertwines art, spirituality, and public responsibility, articulated through four international conferences revolving around the Interreligious Table for Preventive Peace.

Beginning with Arte, Spiritualità e Religione, through a meeting titled From Artifice to the Responsibility of Preventive Peace, means starting from the foundation, not from one theme among others. The interreligious encounter inaugurates the journey because it immediately raises the most radical question: how to live together in difference today, in a world shaped by technology, conflict, and irreversible spiritual plurality. It is the point at which every discourse on art, ethics, and the future of humanity reaches its threshold of truth.

In recent decades, the dominant paradigm of technological innovation has been grounded in a neopositivist vision, oriented toward efficiency, data, measurability, and process optimization. Artificial Intelligence is today its most advanced expression: powerful and pervasive, capable of influencing decisions, relationships, conflicts, and forms of coexistence.

Michelangelo Pistoletto sees in Artificial Intelligence an extraordinary opportunity: the possible fulfillment of a humanity capable of gathering and intertwining the totality of thoughts, made interconnected by networks, supercomputers, and algorithms. An unprecedented result, which breaks down the barriers of space and time and renders operative intuitions inherent to art and creative thought.

Yet spiritual traditions point out a limit: calculation does not exhaust meaning, and efficiency does not coincide with the good. For this reason, the interreligious table proposes a shift in perspective: from Artificial Intelligence understood as a neutral tool to an ethical and spiritual reflection on responsibility, relationship, and human dignity. A transition that can be read symbolically as the passage from neopositivism to an ecology of meaning, understood as a critical neo-humanism, capable of placing significance, value, and purpose back at the center of action.

The first meeting of the exhibition brings together representatives of different spiritual and religious traditions, with very different voices and languages. How does the choice of participants contribute to defining the meaning of this table, and what kind of dialogue is intended through their presence?

Francesco Monico: The selection of guests for the Interreligious Table of Bologna brings together representatives of the world’s major religions. It is an intentional choice, conceived not to force different spiritualities into convergence, but to allow them to co-inhabit a space of responsible confrontation.

The presence of Swamini Shuddhananda Giri, a Hindu nun and recognized representative of the Italian community, introduces an experiential and non-dual dimension of spirituality, where practice precedes doctrine and silence becomes an integral part of language. Filippo Scianna, President of the Italian Buddhist Union, brings a perspective centered on attention, impermanence, and the responsibility of presence: a spirituality grounded not in revelation, but in the constant exercise of consciousness.

With Rabbi Joseph Levi, Judaism emerges as a thought of responsibility and interpretation: a tradition that does not seek synthesis, but preserves the plurality of meanings as a form of fidelity. Father Antonio Spadaro, Undersecretary of the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education, brings a Catholic theology capable of traversing contemporaneity, media languages, and technological transformations, while keeping open the tension between faith, discernment, and the complexity of the present.

The voice of Islam is represented by Imam Nader Akkad of the Great Mosque of Rome, who introduces a reflection on Islam as a living tradition within the contemporary European context, capable of holding together spiritual, communitarian, and civic dimensions, without reducing itself to a rigid or defensive identity.

Taken together, these presences do not form a harmonious choir, but a trinamical device: a table in which differences are not neutralized, but exposed and traversed. The dialogue activated is neither conciliatory nor diplomatic, but responsible: a dialogue that accepts the risk of asymmetry, untranslatability, and fertile dissent. It is precisely this radical plurality that defines the meaning of the inaugural table of the exhibition’s dispositif: not to affirm that unity is already given, but to show its possibility as practice, as shared exercise, as an open ethical space.

This meeting is part of the Interreligious Table path initiated with the project UR-RA – Unity of Religions / Responsibility of Art, presented at the Reggia di Monza. How does the UR-RA experience continue in Bologna, and how is the meaning of the interreligious table renewed within the exhibition Dalla Cittadellarte allo Statodellarte?

Francesco Monico: As stated at the beginning of the interview, this meeting is organically embedded in the path of the Interreligious Table, signed in Biella in February 2025 and developed through UR-RA – Unity of Religions / Responsibility of Art, where it is presented in exhibition form. It represents a living continuity, not a mere repetition.

UR-RA establishes a clear premise: the unity of religions not as doctrinal synthesis nor symbolic agreement, but as an exposed possibility, made practicable by art and its freedom. The interreligious table, in this context, is never conceived as an isolated event, but as a relational device: a space in which differences are not resolved, but assumed responsibly.

This first table thus opens a horizon that is both methodological and ethical. Methodological, because it establishes the grammar of subsequent meetings: reciprocal listening, exposure of differences, responsibility of speech. Ethical, because it places spirituality within the contemporary public sphere, not as an identity-based doctrine, but as a practice of relation.

Within this framework, preventive peace, as elaborated by Pistoletto, is not understood as the mere absence of conflict, but as the capacity to intervene upstream, within the cultural, technological, and decision-making models that generate exclusion, polarization, and dehumanization. The great religious and spiritual traditions, brought into dialogue, do not offer technical solutions, but a shared ethical grammar, capable of orienting technological development before it becomes irreversible.

The table, therefore, is not a place of diplomatic mediation, but a device of responsibility: a space in which ethics is not proclaimed, but practiced. In this sense, discussing Artificial Intelligence means questioning not only what machines can do, but what kind of humanity we are building through them.