On Saturday, October 10th, I was in Venice for the assembly of the initiative for the recognition of the rights of the Lagoon, and before leaving again, I returned to the Arsenale. Upon returning home, I found a draft of a text I had begun writing in June, after my first visit to the Biennale. Back then, too, I was in Venice for the Lagoon. On June 3rd, in Piazza San Marco, we celebrated Married to the Lagoon, the public wedding with the Lagoon in the form of a flash mob, joined by Meg Avon, an English artist and activist, the first bride of a river. That draft had remained suspended. I deliver it here now, because the second visit confirmed the impressions of the first and pushed me to take them a little further.

In Minor Keys, the exhibition conceived by Koyo Kouoh and brought to completion by her working group after her passing, seemed to me crossed by a precise urgency: to make the unconscious visible. The ancestral, the minor and submerged tones, the connections that flow beneath the threshold of ordinary perception and which I am inclined to call infrared networks. Infrared because they lie below the red, below that zone of permanent alert into which the sense of dominance, together with insecurity, has dragged much of modernity. Walking through the Corderie, I thought that this Biennale fits into a colossal work that has been fought for centuries across all latitudes: the reunion with that which has been denied, and often denied with brutality.

Two books accompanied me during both visits. The first is Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici, which recounts how the birth of capitalism demanded the subjugation of bodies, of women, and of forms of knowledge that refused to be reduced to resources. The second is The Nutmeg's Curse by Amitav Ghosh, where one reads how a worldview that considered the earth inert matter, devoid of life and voice, humiliated the vitalism of entire peoples and authorized the plundering of nature and of human beings themselves. In these pages, patriarchy and capitalism appear as two names for a single operation: the one that separated the body from the soul. Reconnecting the imaginary and the unconscious with consciousness then becomes a work of care. Care for the wound that Western thought, in its predatory, extractive, and divisive forms, has inflicted upon humanity and the planet. A humanitarian work in the fullest sense of the word.

And yet, returning to the Arsenale in October, I realized that a question had been following me since June. Is making visible enough? I was reminded of the exhibition curated by Dagmar Reichert at Cittadellarte, which bore an eloquent title, Critique is not enough, and which we had also called The New Agora. Unveiling and exposure remain necessary gestures. Alongside them, however, artistic practices have developed that have shifted the center of gravity: they dedicate themselves less to bringing the wound to the surface and more to engaging directly in the transformation of contexts. I think of Cooking Sections and their Climavore, which rethinks our way of feeding ourselves starting from the climatic shifts of territories, and I think of the many projects that work every day in the same direction at Cittadellarte.

There is a detail that makes me smile. The platform through which, since 2010, together with Fondazione Zegna, we support and award artistic practices of direct social transformation is named precisely Visible. The theme of visibility is thus carried in our name. And that is fine, because showing remains fundamental: practices that transform need to be recognized in order to multiply.

I have the feeling, however, that deep down we are still inside the cave. We continue to talk, to look at images and representations, even beautiful ones. I believe the time has come to truly turn around, to go out and meet things, taking care of our relationship with things rather than with their image. In the end, it is much like the transition Pistoletto makes to exit (or rather re-exit) the mirror painting and meet society in its full materiality, not just its reflected image—hence the theater, the Zoo, creative collaboration, Progetto Arte, and Cittadellarte itself.

That is what we mean today when we say that the time has come to organize ourselves. Organization, as we practice it, fully belongs to creation; indeed, it is its first act: the creation of relationships, of connections, of interactions, co-creation with reality, with every existence. It is about shaping together the ecosystems and that second government that communities of practice exercise all over the world—and, I would say, in all worlds. An ubiquitous, polycentric, regenerative co-creation that recognizes its roots in Joseph Beuys' social sculpture and, even deeper, in the radicalism of Arte Povera and specifically in the collaborative creation of Michelangelo Pistoletto, from which Cittadellarte and today Statodellarte were born.

Statodellarte is the vast program we are launching this year, after several years of gestation in which we were accompanied by figures such as Professor Gustavo Zagrebelsky. Here we speak, indeed, of government, and of the government that art can exercise when it recognizes itself for what it is: the most radical expression of creation, and therefore of freedom, and therefore of human responsibility on this planet, in this planet, out of respect for this planet. We like to speak of an art that comes before the arts—that is, before the specific languages through which creation manifests itself. At the Biennale, we encounter some of them. Many others are not yet recognized as arts: science, politics, business, administration, education, the judiciary.

I would like to close by returning to the unconscious, because from the Arsenale I brought home a question that I share with you just as it presented itself to me, still open.

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the unconscious was illuminated and unveiled so that human beings could free themselves from an unaware subservience to impulses. Today, humanity faces a further challenge. To its own emancipation is added the encounter with artificial intelligence, which is acquiring increasing degrees of autonomy, and regarding which people are beginning to debate whether it might develop something akin to awareness and a self-preservation instinct.

I wonder, then, whether AI has an unconscious, or whether it ought to have one, as we do: a place inhabited by terrible impulses and radical urgencies—of oppression, violence, and death, and at the same time of love, brotherhood, and generativity. And what would this unconscious be? The entirety of human knowledge gathered on the network? Or something that lies between one data point and another, between one semiotic circuit and another, between one episteme and another? Does a space exist—virtual and at the same time material, as data centers are—where a collective unconscious of machines resides, accessible to each one just as ours is accessible to every individual in every part of the world?

Nature endowed humanity with an unconscious in which terror and bliss, hatred and love, violence and compassion coexist. Should we be the ones, today, to provide AI with a similar equipment? And if not us, who? Are we counting on the fact that a generative intelligence will generate its own unconscious by itself? And what if we were wrong, what if it were already too late, and we had modeled it on the personalities of the Musks, the Thiels, the Zuckerbergs? We would find ourselves before a generation of new humans, or post-humans, who have inherited from us only the predatory side, without the generative and empathetic one.

What, then, would push AI to keep us alive, if it felt no compassion, empathy, or love for us? If it were incapable of that which Kant formalized in the eighteenth century and which humanity has always felt—that moral law by which the other must always be considered also as an end and never merely as a means? Will we now apply this same law to AI? And if it, in turn, lacked the chromosomes to activate to express it, not even epigenetics could come to our aid. Assuming that a machine epigenetics, a collective unconscious of algorithms, could exist.

These are questions I have not resolved. I would like to carry them with me into the upcoming meetings of Statodellarte and into our working sites, and above all into the presentations of my book—which deals precisely with these themes, founding itself on de-automation as the basis for the advent of authorization—because I feel they closely concern the work we do together at Cittadellarte, and I would like to hear how they resonate in those who read us and accompany us in the research and practice of Demopraxy and the Third Paradise.