Throughout 2026, the Cittadellarte Journal is hosting a series of interviews with staff members and collaborators of the Foundation, who have been asked to respond to an identical set of questions. Cittadellarte in the mirror – the title of this column – acts as an exercise in listening and self-reflection that spans different roles, practices, and sensibilities, offering 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 put themselves out there, and to question their role in the present.

In this 24th episode, the mirror turns to Alessandra Bury: an art historian and cultural designer, at Cittadellarte she develops pathways in which art and education become tools for connection, participation, and social transformation. Within the Learning Environments Office, she coordinates projects aimed at schools, families, and cultural institutions, with a particular focus on creating learning environments that foster autonomy, critical thinking, and creativity. She works as a trainer and teaches at the Terzo Paradiso Open School, where she experiments with educational practices linked above all to mathematics – a discipline she considers a tool for measuring the world, but also for imagining it and inhabiting it with a critical and imaginative spirit.

In the conversation that follows, Alessandra Bury focuses on the theme of transformation, starting from the very meaning of the word: transire, to cross over or pass through. A verb that becomes a key to contemplating her way of understanding education as a practice capable of giving shape to uncertainty and turning it into an experience. From artificial intelligence to the need to cultivate a "well-formed mind", from moving past the idea of art as a separate world to the fragility of relationships, her gaze returns repeatedly to the same requirement: creating the conditions for people to choose, meet, and recognise one another.

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 fatigue and a return to the logics of power, war, and isolation. 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?
Transition comes from transire, "to cross over". And crossing over is never a comfortable condition: it takes time, accepts uncertainty, and does not guarantee an immediate direction. It is precisely for this reason that I believe shared practices hold a fundamental value: they do not eliminate uncertainty, but they allow us to inhabit it together, transforming it into a learning environment – which is also the name of our office. And working in the Learning Environments Office, I feel that today the issue is not so much changing our vocabulary, but restoring weight to words through our actions. After all, to learn (apprendere) means to "grasp", to make something one's own, to "take with oneself". Perhaps today social transformation only still makes sense if we manage to truly learn it: not as a concept to be repeated, nor as a shared vocabulary, but as something we choose to carry with us, in our daily practices and, above all, in our relationships.

Once again this year, Cittadellarte operated on both a local and global level: from China to border-town Europe, from the Mediterranean to East Asia. Bringing an installation or a demopratic work into places steeped in history, conflict, or symbolism exposes art to unpredictable interpretations. How important is it for the Foundation to accept this risk?
Accepting this risk is essential. An artwork never arrives in a place as a neutral object: it carries a universe of meaning with it, but it is the cultural context in which it is placed that makes those meanings alive, alters them, and multiplies them. For this reason, every context does not only change the way we look at the artwork, but the artwork also changes the way we look at that context (to paraphrase Panofsky).
Furthermore, if we are talking about a demopratic work, engagement with the context becomes even more necessary: change is not imposed from above, but built from the ground up, through shared action, dialogue, and the responsibility of a community. The unpredictability of interpretations is therefore not a risk to be avoided, but a condition to be embraced. If Cittadellarte envisions art as an engine for social transformation, it cannot shrink from this unpredictability. Indeed, today it would perhaps be riskier to try to control its meaning. Besides, if there were only one correct interpretation, we wouldn't need art – we would just need an instruction manual.

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?
Rather than teaching people to compete with algorithms, I believe today's real educational challenge is to cultivate what algorithms cannot replace: critical thinking, autonomy, and the ability to take responsibility for one's own choices. Authorship does not mean doing everything by oneself, but maintaining a conscious perspective on what we choose to delegate.

As a teacher at the Open School and, more broadly, as someone involved in education, these are some of the topics I reflect on daily alongside my colleagues. We believe our task is primarily to educate for responsibility: to create environments where it is possible to learn how to choose, how to make mistakes, and how to build autonomy. It is not about filling heads with information, but about shaping a "well-formed mind", capable of connecting, interpreting, and questioning what it knows. If every answer is already available, then the value of education no longer lies in finding answers, but in learning to ask better questions.

I prefer a classroom full of doubts to one full of perfect answers... if only because perfect answers are already being written by someone else!

During your time at Cittadellarte, what do you feel you have unlearned? Is there a conviction you would let go of today compared to the past?
When I was very young, I dreamed of being a curator. Then a gallery owner. In short, I imagined my future inside what I called "the art world". At Cittadellarte, I unlearned precisely that idea: that art belongs to a separate world. The opposite is actually true: it is art that exists within the world, becoming a driver for thoughts, projects, and actions. This has also allowed me to reconcile my two great passions, art and education, without feeling the need to confine them solely to art education. Today, I find comfort in knowing that art can inhabit a school, a community, a project, or a conversation.

Let us try to consider Cittadellarte as a living organism. Which part do you feel is most fragile today? And which part, by contrast, is more mature than you would have imagined?
If I think of Cittadellarte as a living organism, the most fragile part is not the people, but the relationships that hold them together. In moments of great change, the risk is that time for listening and dialogue gets sacrificed to the urgency of doing. Yet it is precisely that connective tissue that makes everything else possible. The most mature part, on the other hand, continues to surprise me: it is the quality of the people. Their willingness, their care, the variety of their skills, and their ability to put them at the service of others. It is a richness that we might not always see, but which emerges every time we face a shared challenge.

We live in a time where we are exposed daily to images of extreme suffering, yet we often remain immobile. What kind of emotion is indifference? If it were an artwork, would you destroy it like a smashing of Pistoletto's mirror?
I am not certain I consider indifference to be an emotion, but rather a suspension of relationship – the moment we stop recognising ourselves in one another. I would destroy it, like a smashing of the mirror, precisely because Pistoletto’s broken mirror carries the exact opposite meaning: every fragment continues to reflect a part of the world, just as every person continues to reflect and be reflected by others. A society exists when those fragments manage to recognise themselves as part of a common image. Indifference perhaps arises when we forget this connection and stop seeing a part of ourselves in the other. After the mirror breaks, then, I believe our task today is to continuously piece the reflection back together, through relationships, listening, and mutual responsibility.

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 suffering? Keeping in mind, too, that the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year for 2025 was "Rage Bait", referring to content created to provoke anger and outrage, particularly on social media.
When I was seven years old, I was mesmerised by Marina Abramović's Balkan Baroque: sitting on a mountain of bones, trying in vain to scrub them clean of blood. Thirty years ago, that artwork managed to make the absurdity of war visible with a power that remains extraordinary even today.

Today, we live immersed in a continuous stream of images of suffering. I don't believe works like that have lost their meaning; rather, I think that on their own, they are no longer enough. If outrage becomes an everyday language, the risk is that empathy gets worn away too. Every era asks different tools of art, which is why I think today art's responsibility is not merely to depict suffering, but to create the conditions for people to come together again. Art does not restore humanity because it displays suffering better. It restores it when it makes meeting one another possible again. This doesn't mean giving up on the power of the image, however. Perhaps today its responsibility lies elsewhere: stepping away from the speed of visual consumption and giving us back the time to look. Slow watching is not just a way of observing an artwork, but an exercise in mindfulness, a way to train the mind and cleanse it of rage bait.

When you turn off the lights in your office, which emotion stays lit?
The truth is, when I turn off the office lights, my thoughts almost always stay on. In our line of work, ideas have a bad habit of arriving at the most inconvenient moments: whilst cooking, on the train, or during a walk. Suddenly I think of an activity to include in a project, the right exercise for a child struggling with fractions, or a connection that I hadn't seen whilst sitting at my desk. I think this happens to many of my colleagues. It is the privilege – and occasionally the curse – of doing a job where you don't produce objects, but possibilities. Perhaps, more than an emotion, it is curiosity that stays lit. And, fortunately, it consumes very little energy... at least, electrical energy.