Throughout 2026, the Cittadellarte Journal is hosting a series of interviews with the Fondazione’s collaborators, who are asked to answer an identical set of questions. ‘Cittadellarte in the Mirror’ – this is the name of the feature – serves as an exercise in listening and self-reflection that spans different roles, practices, and sensitivities, rendering 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 question their own role in the present.

In this eighteenth instalment, the mirror turns towards Melina Uchoa, from Michelangelo Pistoletto and Cittadellarte’s communication team. Originally from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, "I grew up in a family that always surrounded me with values that I managed to find again in a small town on the other side of the world: Biella. Values that made me realise that human contact with nature is essential for everything we do in life, and that art and culture possess a transformative power capable of expanding each person’s universe." As the daughter of a teacher and an expert in the socio-environmental field, Melina’s curiosity and respect "for all ways of life on Earth – she emphasised – have always been fundamental in my upbringing." She chose to follow a very different path from the rest of her family, graduating in Fashion Design in Brazil. After a four-year course and two internships, she worked in marketing within the fashion sector, spanning art direction, styling, strategic campaign planning, photography, set design, and executive direction. In parallel, her passion for art also became a profession: she was responsible for communication in her brother’s art gallery, an experience "which offered me another perspective on marketing and on the need to tell a story through complex narratives of artists and designers who have shaped history." Then came 2020, the pandemic, Covid... and everything changed: "It turned everything upside down. The concept of work as I knew it no longer existed, and what we now know as remote working (home office) became my reality, but this time within startups, still in marketing and project management, working across the American, European, and Asian markets." 2023 was a year of returning to her roots: focusing her energy on fashion, this time in Biella, through the Accademia Unidee of Fondazione Pistoletto. "A course that spoke about fashion and sustainability, in a place that breathes art, deep questioning, and change, seemed to me an excellent opportunity to resume my studies. The cycle was completed after a three-year programme, when I did my internship at the Fondazione’s Fashion Office, which led me to understand concretely what Cittadellarte was capable of doing and to see in practice the years of study dedicated to sustainability. This first experience here, and the wonderful people who crossed my path, were crucial in opening the doors to the communication team of the Fondazione and of Michelangelo Pistoletto, of which I am a part today."

In the following interview, Melina Uchoa navigates the theme of transformation with a gaze that brings together memory, movement, and collective responsibility. Her answers stem from the experience of someone who has inhabited different contexts – from fashion to startups, from communication to contemporary art – without losing the need to find a "human centre" in the situations she has lived through. Rather than speaking of change as an abstract concept, Melina focuses on the importance of minimal gestures, connections between people, and the possibility that even a single individual can trigger a positive domino effect on the world.

2025 draws to a close as a year in which the word “transition” seems to have lost its strength, replaced by a widespread sense of weariness and a return to the logic of power, war, and closure. In this context, does it still make sense to talk about responsible social transformation, or do we need to change our vocabulary and rethink our practices?
I believe that, in any context, whether turbulent or peaceful, there will always be room to talk about responsible social transformation. This space needs to be even larger, carrying greater weight, in a time like the present. The cyclical moments of humanity require an adjustment of tone and consistency, especially in "necessary" discourses such as this one. The solution for implementing more humane practices, with values that welcome our differences peacefully and make us fairer towards an ethical and intelligent evolution, will always be to shout louder and not back down. There is a popular saying in Brazil that goes: "A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor."

Once again this year, Cittadellarte operated on both a local and global scale: from China to bordering 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?Accepting this risk is crucial for maintaining and spreading the values disseminated by Cittadellarte and, above all, for keeping the space for dialogue open. The unpredictability of these works, which take on a life of their own in each place that welcomes them, adds even more symbolic and practical value to that particular ecosystem and, consequently, generates concrete results in the socio-environmental sphere. Exploring territories with different histories and under completely different cultures urges us to practise the act of empathy in a deeper way. This has everything to do with Demopraxy, a concept born here at the Fondazione – conceived by director Paolo Naldini, ed. – and which is now spreading across the world.

In 2026, what does it mean to educate for responsibility in a world where algorithms, artificial intelligence, and automation seem to strip away more and more space from conscious human action and, in this sense, from authorship?
In the current context, educating increasingly means looking to the past without giving up on progress. It means recovering aspects of our ancestry, of human contact and contact with nature, and placing them as the foundation for everything that comes after. And whatever comes after, with all its technological adaptations, must use this foundation to evolve towards a better world, making the worldly and human experience walk hand in hand with information. As the philosopher and educator Paulo Freire argued, education is not a mere transfer of knowledge, but the creation of possibilities for its own production. In a world governed by algorithms that attempt to predict and shape our choices, educating for responsibility therefore means reactivating our critical capacity and recognising ourselves as the authors of our own history, and not just as spectators of technology.

During your time at Cittadellarte, what do you feel you have unlearned? Is there a belief from the past that you would let go of today?
I have unlearned underestimating the capacity of a single person to be an engine of change in society. And I have learned that we have, within each of us, a gigantic power to change small realities which then become medium, large, and gigantic, in a domino effect. We become a network. Before, perhaps coming from a country of continental dimensions and with countless social issues stemming from centuries of colonisation, I used to underestimate this "inch-by-inch work”, which seemed to me something very distant and difficult to achieve.

Let us try to consider Cittadellarte as a living organism. Which part do you feel is most fragile today? And which, on the other hand, is more mature than you would have imagined?
I believe the greatest challenge today is the complexity of communicating in a cohesive and, at the same time, attractive way what Cittadellarte is, all the projects developed inside here, and the impact generated locally and globally. Simultaneously, translating the thought of our founder, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and of the Fondazione as a living factory of ideas, adapting this message to different languages and audiences. The most mature part, however, is undoubtedly its legs, but also its body: Cittadellarte has already been walking independently for a long time, sustained by the arduous and daily work of each of the "Cittadini" (collaborators of Cittadellarte), as well as, of course, Maria and Michelangelo. It was this "muscle mass" that made it possible to build an extraordinary global reputation, which today, more than ever, must continue to be boosted and adapted to the present and the future.

We live in a time where we are exposed daily to images of extreme pain, yet we often remain motionless. What kind of emotion is indifference? If the latter were a work of art, would you destroy it like a shattering of Pistoletto’s mirror?
Indifference, to me, means almost cancelling one’s own existence. It goes against the natural laws of human evolution and our primitive essence, which allowed us to get this far. Ever since human beings began to inhabit the world, struggle has always been necessary to bring about change. Inertia has always been our greatest predator.
Contemporary art intends to stimulate the imagination along with critical thinking. Michelangelo symbolised this through the revolutionary breaking of the mirror, just as others have done through other semiotic codes and languages. And perhaps that is precisely the beauty of art: the manifold and extremely personal capacity to give voice to issues and feelings that are often difficult to materialise.

In the dominant and 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 bear in mind that the word of the year 2025, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is “Rage Bait”, which denotes content created to provoke anger and indignation, particularly on social media.
Art has the power to give a name to these erased faces. To make us live through experiences we have never experienced and, in turn, to practise a very pure form of empathy, which emerges from a collective imagination that is often constructed through a bombardment of information. This dialogues directly with Hannah Arendt’s concept of the "banality of evil": the greatest violence often stems not from monstrosity, but from the inability to think critically and to put oneself in another’s shoes, generating an anaesthetised indifference. In times when the suffering of others is transformed into a digital commodity to generate engagement through hatred, art takes on the responsibility of breaking this logic of spectacularisation. By restoring the face to the number and humanity to pain, art forces us to stop, to feel, and to deconstruct anger in order to reactivate our capacity for compassion.

When you turn off the lights in your office, which emotion remains switched on?
An emotion that does not switch off is that of a continuous intellectual stimulus, a thirst for knowledge, with the certainty that what we do inside here does, in fact, have a purpose and the possibility of changing small and large realities out there. And, with that, we are part of history.

Photo: Dalia Jacobs