Throughout 2026, the Cittadellarte Journal is hosting a series of interviews with the Foundation’s collaborators, invited to answer an identical set of questions. Cittadellarte in the mirror - the name of the column - serves as an exercise in listening and self-reflection that spans different roles, practices, and sensibilities, providing a plural portrait of the Cittadellarte organism. The questions touch upon some of the most urgent issues of our time - from social transformation to responsibility, from education to indifference, from the risk of artistic action to the possibility of reactivating empathy - and function as a mirror: they do not seek definitive answers, but ask the respondents to take a stand, to expose themselves, and to interrogate their own role in the present.

In this seventeenth instalment, the mirror turns to Michele Cerruti But, Director of the Visual Arts Department at Accademia Unidee, adjunct professor of Urban Planning at the Politecnico di Torino, and facilitator of the national research project Arte e Spazio Pubblico (DGCC and Scuola del Patrimonio – Ministry of Culture). His work focuses on relationality and spatial practices, bridging urbanism and socially engaged art. Through a multidisciplinary approach, he investigates the processes of spatial production and the dynamics of territorial transformation, with particular attention to the spatial configurations of contemporary forms of production - especially within medial territories - and artistic practices. Recent publications include: Inhabiting Future Frictions (2025), A Relational Urbanism (2024), and Spatial Tensions in Urban Design (2021).

In the following interview, Michele Cerruti But seeks neither shortcuts nor reassuring definitions. He brings every question back to a more radical point: creation as an original act, space as a place of tension to be inhabited. His answers traverse the experience of Accademia Unidee as a daily context for research, where nothing is definitive, and everything can be brought back into play. His gaze is clear: he rejects the idea of art being called to “serve” something, asserting its political nature instead: a way of being in the world and transforming it, starting from the - always open - possibility of creating.

2025 draws to a close as a year in which the word “transition” seems to have lost its power, replaced by a widespread sense of weariness and a return to the 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 vocabulary and rethink the practices? Cittadellarte’s mission is to transform society responsibly by placing art at the centre. It is its DNA. This means it’s not just about vocabulary, or just about practices, but a literal idea of reality: one in which society has a form, and that form can change. One can certainly recognise that other vocabularies are similar, or other positions overlap, but this is what Cittadellarte wants to do, and it has its specificity precisely because it concerns its very statutes. Amidst the contemporary distrust in coexistence, it is not so much a matter of changing language or practices, but of asking what the new form of the social might be, and what "responsibility" might mean today. It is an operation that goes to the depths of who we are and what we do, rather than a domesticating of our way of acting and thinking.

Once again this year, Cittadellarte has operated on both local and global levels: from China to the borderlands of Europe, from the Mediterranean to East Asia. Bringing an installation or a demopractic work to places laden with history, conflict, or symbolism exposes art to unpredictable interpretations. How important is it for the Foundation to accept this risk? Any artistic intervention that enters any public space is an intervention that confronts friction. It is the friction of the space of living together, and sometimes it is the geopolitical friction, or that of radical injustice, or immense conflict, which characterises our existences. And always, in whatever language art expresses itself in public space, it tells of ways of inhabiting 그 friction. Sometimes it makes it visible, other times it misunderstands it, and other times still, it resolves it. But it never happens that art is "exposed" to something, as if passively enduring it. It is the opposite: it is art that autonomously decides to "expose itself", assuming responsibility for what it might generate, whether desired or not. In this sense, since the Foundation is not so much a place for the preservation of memory — an old-fashioned museum — but is primarily a device for collective artistic production, it simply cannot do otherwise. Assuming the entirety of this responsibility.

In 2026, what does it mean to educate for responsibility in a world where algorithms, artificial intelligence, and automation seem to subtract more and more space from conscious human action and, in this sense, from authorship?
It means educating for Creation. That is what we do at Accademia Unidee: here, we train young artists and young fashion designers who are capable of using their most powerful human capacity, which is the capacity to create. Knowing how to stand within the central space of the Third Paradise, as Michelangelo would say. Recognising one’s own extreme freedom, and from that freedom, once again, one’s responsibility. If you know how to do this, the multiplicity of intelligences or technologies or algorithms does not scare you, because it becomes an "other" with whom you learn together to create new meanings for inhabiting reality.

In the time spent at Cittadellarte, what do you feel you have unlearned? Is there a conviction you would let go of today compared to the past?
Considering things as definitive. This is also another thing one learns at the Academy: that research never ends, that one must continuously begin again. Learning to fail, and learning to fail better.

Let’s try to consider Cittadellarte as a living organism. Which part do you feel is most fragile today? And which, instead, is more mature than you would have imagined?
I believe there is a misunderstanding regarding how we contrast fragility and maturity. What is most fragile is often also what is most mature, because over time it has understood how to exist without the need to harden itself. Cittadellarte — just like the Academy — is, in its entirety, an extremely fragile place. And simultaneously, a place where one can be fragile. To me, it seems the best antidote to the drive towards generalised performativity, which is anything but mature.

We live in a time where we are exposed daily to images of extreme pain, yet we often remain immobile. What kind of emotion is indifference? If the latter were a work of art, would you destroy it like a breaking of Pistoletto’s mirror?
It must first be said that when Pistoletto breaks a mirror, he is not destroying a work of art but creating another work. At the Academy, we confront the dimension of pain every day, which comes from the lives of our students and from the constant confrontation with reality. For this reason, it is rather unrealistic to think of remaining indifferent, because all of this never remains just an image; it is part of our being together. What we do, together with students and teachers, is once again to try to work with our capacity to create, not to destroy. It seems to me the only reasonable thing that I, and we, could continue to do.

In the dominant media narrative 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 spectacularisation of pain? Let us also keep in mind that the word of the year for 2025, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is "Rage Bait", referring to content created to provoke anger and indignation, particularly on social media.
I believe it is fundamental to specify that "Art" does not exist abstractly and that it is never just one thing, because it is instead a multitude of forms, languages, and practices that are always situated in time and space. I also think it is a mistake to think that art should take on a media dimension with the aim of solving the communication problems of politics, or transform itself into a kind of public service announcement. Rather, the responsibility of art is to recognise its political status, which never fails: whether in a pictorial practice or in a socially engaged work. Political responsibility is, in this sense, the very depth of creation — a constitutive part of creating. One student at the Academy maintains that art must confront the complexity of the world, bring it into the creation, and in this way bring it back to society: "redistributing the sensible," as Rancière would say. Another student believes that art is the way to let people experience joy as a condition of collective flourishing. Yet another, that art is about making people participate in freedom. This is the political responsibility of what is learned at the Cittadellarte Academy.

When you turn off the lights in your office, what emotion remains lit?
The urgency of the future. Especially that of our students.