Posts with tag Cittadellarte

”China!” The representative from the local business sector answers the question with one single word. In the North Italian town Biella, textile has been the major business since 13th century. In the beginning of 19th century they imported technical skills and knowledge from Manchester. Along the rivers in the bottom of the steep valleys manufacturing of textile was industrialised.

But Biella can no longer escape the globalised economy and its undercurrents. China is taking over. In less than ten years, thousands of jobs have disappeared. Twenty-five thousands are still left. A short-time visitor gets the feeling of travelling through a landscape of industrial heritage.

As in so many places in Europe, the authorities are putting their hopes to the cultural and creative sector. Art, creativity and tourism will save the local area. The listeners of today’s seminar are a mixture of business economists, philosophers and artists that take part in the intellectual experiment ”Nurope, the Nomadic University”. One of the initiators is the Italian organisation Cittadellarte.

Cittadellarte is the work of the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. He bought an old spinning mill in Biella in the beginning of the 1990s. With a fixed purpose he has restored, built and organised what seems very close to a dream of a modern renaissance workshop. This is meant to be a place for reflection, a laboratory for new thoughts that needs to be formed and formulated if our planet is to survive. Pistolettos thoughts of art have been described as a-modern. In his vision of societal changes, art plays the main part.

In the ears of a sceptical Northerner, it sounds a bit bombastic. But if you have been forced to take part of the discussions on culture and business that at the moment is taking place at most parts of the country – and it’s discussed in many places; artistic universities and unemployment offices, at endless seminars and conferences – Pistolettos self-evident belief in the value of art for arts sake is refreshing. It’s far from the moralising undertones that you can find in the Swedish discussions. Artists have difficulties in finding a viable way of living. So they have failed as small-scale businesses. Therefore they should be taught to become entrepreneurs.

Maybe it’s instead as Pistoletto is saying or as the anarchistic business economist Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, one of the initiators of Nurope, has argued in several books: The business sector has a lot to learn from the artists.

The article is written by David Karlsson and was published in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter at February 13 2007. Find the original Swedish version in PDF here: artikel_dn_070213.pdf. Translation by Lotta Lekvall. Photo 1: Biella, Photo 2: inside Cittadellarte, Photo 3: Art piece by Mr Pistoletto inside Cittadellarte. www.nurope.eu and Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto.