N.42 | How to read the future? The art and the future we want

The world changes, trends accelerate (think of what happened in a few weeks with the digitization of work processes in time for Covid 19), trends contract, change and vanish, while others take shape. We have entered an era in which it is increasingly necessary to change the way we look to the future by constructing possible scenarios that interpret the emerging signs.

The continuous evolution of things cannot be managed and contrasts by changing course at all times, and one cannot even remain granite in positions that are no longer “contemporary with respect to what is happening "here and now". The challenge is to look at the future with different eyes, foreseeing possible alternative scenarios and working to achieve what we believe to be compatible and coherent for us. But how can we understand the future? One possible answer is in art.

Artistic creation is a form of autonomous language that allows us to know and interpret the world and to understand its implications that we had not thought of (when it is not limited to being only form and decoration). The artist expresses his own point of view as well as an aesthetic canon, a set of meanings that himself finds in reality and that anticipates some possible future scenarios.

The management has managed to exponentially increase business productivity thanks to the use of the technique, which now needs to be integrated with an overall vision capacity, a vision typically of artists. The question we should ask ourselves is: what future do we want for ourselves? For the people we love and for our companies?

Michelangelo Pistoletto in 1967 gave life to the “Venere degli Stracci". With this work, the artist compared the classical idea of beauty (an orderly idea represented by Venus, a symbol of beauty and fertility) with a heap of discarded clothes, thus playing on the contrast between these elements. An antithesis that forces us to reflect on our idea of possible beauty in our world.

We believe that in the future we must seek a new synthesis between beauty and sustainability, and that, starting from the regeneration of rags it is possible to design new and multiple forms of beauty. It will be exactly beauty (thanks to new technologies) that will save the world, but this will depend on each of us.

(immagine: Venere degli stracci di Michelangelo Pistoletto)