The end of a year is never merely a matter of the calendar. It is a threshold. A point at which time slows down, folds in on itself, and asks to be looked at.
2025 comes to a close in a climate that bears little resemblance to the idea of transition that has accompanied us in recent years: the language of change seems worn out, while words such as war, power, borders, and indifference dominate, both socially and in the media.
In this scenario, art risks appearing marginal, even superfluous. And yet, it is precisely in moments of collective “fatigue” that it becomes urgent to question its role: not as a decoration of the present, but as a practice capable of making an impact, disrupting the standardization of thought, and reactivating sensitivity and responsibility.
As every year, our Journal entrusts this wide-ranging reflection to Paolo Naldini, Director of the Fondazione Pistoletto. This dialogue is not a balance sheet, nor a celebration, but an exercise in research. It is a moment of self-examination in the mirror. From the local to the global dimension, from the school as a radical space of formation to the theme of emotions and indifference in the face of others’ suffering, the interview traverses the most urgent issues of our time. Not to find definitive answers, but to continue searching, even when the world seems to have stopped doing so.

2025 closes as a year in which the word “transition” seems to have lost its strength, replaced by a widespread sense of fatigue and a return to logics of power, war, and closure. In this context, does it still make sense to speak of responsible social transformation, or is it necessary to change the language and rethink practices?
The populist, authoritarian, and anti-democratic drift that has further intensified and become unmistakable this year strengthens the motivations that led us to establish the demopractic Statedellarte as the most advanced program for art’s engagement in society. Transformation is clearly underway, unfortunately toward increasingly unjust and destructive models of coexistence. Therefore, the attribute “responsible” becomes even more meaningful; I would say it is the keystone to be applied in every context.

This year as well, Cittadellarte has operated on both a local and global level: from China to Europe’s borderlands, from the Mediterranean to East Asia. Bringing an installation or a demopractic work into places laden with history, conflict, or symbolism exposes art to unpredictable interpretations. How important is it for the Foundation to accept this risk?
Not only is it inevitable, it is planned. Encountering contexts is always an operation that cannot be fully controlled and, in fact, constitutes co-creation. In some cases, outcomes can be deeply problematic, as with the burning of Venus of the Rags in Naples. In other cases - far more frequent - the surprise lies in the generative outcomes of projects, processes, realities, and experiences that were not foreseen but are very welcome.
The artwork “works”, that is, it exerts an action precisely because it is a successful work of art. The work that Cittadellarte creates and transmits to our students achieves this activity not in isolation, but precisely through co-creation with the inhabitants who invite it, welcome it, and develop it.

Over the years, you have repeatedly stated that Cittadellarte is, radically, a school. In 2025, what does it mean to educate for responsibility in a world where algorithms, artificial intelligence, and automation seem to be increasingly subtracting space from conscious human action and, in this sense, from authorship?
We must continue the ongoing journey from a society of automatons to a society of authors. Automatons are forms of life without awareness or decision-making capacity. Nature has generated automatons, but it has also instilled in animals forms and degrees of awareness that paved the way for the author within us. Humans have expressed this potential for self-determination to the highest degree, conquering the spaces of natural automatism.
Within this tension lies that dynamic balance between opposites (automaton–author) which, once again, confirms the Formula of Creation. The challenges posed by artificial intelligence bring this issue into even sharper focus. In this regard as well, I am convinced that cultivating the muscle of creation is the best antidote to the risk - one that must be avoided - of granting excessive space to automation and artificial intelligence.
As you rightly noted, the school we develop at Cittadellarte is based on this vision: art at the center of every human activity, art understood as the highest expression of the authorial dimension, whether it involves children from the Third Paradise Open School, students of the Accademia Unidee, residents of the UNIDEE Residency Programs, participants in the Terme Culturali, or members of the working tables of demopractic workshops in Biella and around the world, and indeed every person or group that takes part in Cittadellarte as an individual or a collective.

Paolo, you have always emphasized the importance of learning new things, both in professional and personal life. Let’s reverse the perspective: after more than twenty years of life and work at Cittadellarte, what do you feel you have unlearned? Is there a belief you would let go of today compared to the past?
I have reconsidered the potential of street demonstrations for political purposes. I had come to believe that they were not only ineffective, but even risked - as in the case of the Arab Spring - bringing negative consequences for the organizers themselves. Today, however, I believe that the performative presence of bodies occupying urban spaces can be an effective component of virtuous civic participation.
I interpret them in particular as moments of expression, of the feelings people experience. I see a healthy circuit at work, driven by the circulation of ideas and emotions within the population, which become visible and manifest not only to the public itself, but significantly to political representatives. The very function of representation is thus updated by the demonstrations a population chooses to express, offering representatives the opportunity to better orient their role.

Let us imagine Cittadellarte as a living organism. Which part feels most fragile today? And which, instead, feels more mature than you might have expected?
The most fragile part remains the circulatory system, that is, the flows that nourish the entire organism: the economy. There is a great heart beating strongly, but we need a more robust circulatory system.
By contrast, the hands are the organ that has impressed me most in terms of strength and maturity: they are the part of the body through which we act upon the environment, bringing our creativity into it. In this sense, I have seen our friends and collaborators grow and develop truly extraordinary capacities to make an impact by realizing our program.

This year you published your first novel, Good Morning, Palestine, whose protagonist is overwhelmed by a moral crisis stemming from the impotence he feels in the face of what you define as genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Unfortunately, this feeling is acutely contemporary: we live in a time in which we are daily exposed to images of extreme suffering, yet often remain motionless. What kind of emotion is indifference? If indifference were a work of art, would you destroy it like Pistoletto’s broken mirror?
Indifference strikes me as an incapacity to be a work of art. And yes, I would like to break it. However, unlike the mirror- which, when broken, generates infinite reflecting fragments, each as reflective as the original whole - I would want the breaking of indifference to generate sensitivity and responsibility.

In the dominant media narratives of conflicts, numbers often replace faces. What responsibility does art have in restoring humanity where political language erases it? Can art reactivate empathy without falling into the spectacle of suffering? Let us also consider that the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025 is “rage bait,” referring to content designed to provoke anger and outrage, particularly on social media.
I am convinced, like many others, including Martha Nussbaum (see her work "Not for Profit"), that art has the function of enabling us to identify with the stories of others, thereby generating empathy, which is the living cement of social structure.
The boundary between art and spectacle seems to me as difficult to define as it is immediate to perceive. I share the Oxford Dictionary’s concern about the spread of a culture of hatred, but I believe that countering it does not mean draining the public sphere of emotion. Rather, it means animating it with opposing feelings such as fraternity, compassion, cosmopolitanism, and justice.

When you turn off the lights in your office, which emotion remains switched on?
Even today, I have not reached the ultimate goal of my research and activity, but I have enjoyed searching for it. And it is not over yet.

Cover image: frame from a video by Hossam Ezzat (courtesy of the Italian Cultural Institute in Cairo) showing Paolo Naldini in Egypt explaining the meaning of the Third Paradise installation on the Giza Plateau. The work was proposed for the fifth edition of Forever Is Now, the open-air exhibition promoted by Art D’Égypte by Culturvator, where contemporary art encounters the millennia-old heritage of ancient Egypt.