Milano: the exhibition “La Pace Preventiva” at Palazzo Reale

Milano: the exhibition “La Pace Preventiva” at Palazzo Reale.

From Thursday 23 March to Sunday 4 June Palazzo Reale presents “Preventive Peace”, an exhibition – installation of Michelangelo Pistoletto designed specifically for the suggestive Hall of the Caryatids. Promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milano Culture, Palazzo Reale, Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto in collaboration with Skira, the exhibition is curated by Fortunato D'Amico and is part of Milano Art Week (11-16 April 2023), the widespread event coordinated by the Culture Department of the Municipality of Milano, in collaboration with miart, which networks the main public institutions and private foundations of the city that deal with modern and contemporary art, with a dedicated program of exhibitions and activities.

Il Labyrinth by Michelangelo Pistoletto it is the path of Preventive Peace, the trace of an itinerary of awareness extended within the large installation set up in the Hall of Caryatids. The installation is the result of the progressive unrolling of the corrugated cardboards arranged over the entire surface of the exhibition space in which the spaces open up to host some of the most emblematic works created by Michelangelo Pistoletto during his activity and is also a trace of the itinerary of awareness that gradually allowed the artist to conceive “art at the center of a responsible transformation of society” an expression that constitutes the mission of his foundation, Cittadellarte, active as a school in Biella since the 90s. A change that is possible, according to Michelangelo Pistoletto, only through a real practice of democracy that involves citizens and their organizations in the processes of responsible social transformation.

The Labyrinth signals the presence of opposing duality between the monster and virtue. For those who delve into his plots, as the hero Theseus did, it is necessary to advance while avoiding missteps that could compromise his life and that of others. The risk is of being swallowed up by the only inhabitant who lives in the labyrinth, the Minotaur, universal symbol of all arrogance, clashes and conflicts.
“Today humanity has fallen into an immense labyrinth built on a global scale, defeating the ancestral emblem of evil with a warmongering instinct is certainly not an easy thing; the outcome is not a foregone conclusion and success is not guaranteed. You enter and exit the labyrinth only by taking care to draw up a meticulous project of ideas, planning every detail to achieve the pre-established intentions.
It is only through the practice of Preventive Peace that we will be able to annihilate the monster and definitively abandon the labyrinth of conflicts” – declared the curator of the exhibition Fortunato D'Amico.

The visitor to the La Pace Preventiva exhibition will necessarily have to do so a sinuous and disorienting path walking inside the Labyrinth. In this "laborious contraption of art" at every crossroads he will necessarily have to choose the route to take to reach the other works on display, pause in front of them and reflect on their existence. Upon leaving the installation, you will carry with you the memory of an experience rich in imaginative content and practical information, but also the awareness of having completed a tangible, effective exercise for reflecting on ways to escape the labyrinth of everyday reality and establish Preventive Peace.

Seventy years ago, in 1953, right in the Hall of Caryatids still burdened by the signs of the war caused by the Second World War, Pablo Picasso exhibited the large canvas Guernica; in the context of the pictorial story we can glimpse the head of the Minotaur, the monster that dominates the labyrinth scene. In 1961 the Spanish artist drew the Dove of Peace, the same as the student Manish Paul, from the Vinci Secondary School, winner of the award “Educating for peace: Leonardo, Picasso, Pistoletto” in the 2014-2015 school year, it will use, replacing the olive branch in the beak with the trinamic sign-symbol of the Third Paradise. Michelangelo Pistoletto takes on the design of Manish Paul, to create the logo-image of La Pace Preventiva.
Pistoletto, as early as 1969, designed his first Labyrinth at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. Inside the installation, three members of Lo Zoo, a multidisciplinary artistic group founded by Michelangelo Pistoletto himself the previous year, perform performative actions by playing long megaphones used as if they were trumpets. In the following years the Labyrinth will be presented again on the occasion of other exhibitions, each time adapted to the environment that hosts it.

The labyrinths in our information age take on aspects conforming to the soft realities of digital electronic engineering, they process and manage the information of the entire network of interconnected nodes that support the communication channels.
Their presence manifests itself through different, invisible forms, which often escape the observation of even the most attentive critics, perhaps for this reason their impact on the planet has assumed gigantic dimensions. Humanity today has a formidable device at its disposal to counter the monster and establish Preventive Peace: The Formula of Creation by Michelangelo Pistoletto. It presents itself as a sign, a symbol, a mathematical expression capable of summarizing the individual and collective research conducted by the artist and his organisation, Cittadellarte, together with the Ambassadors of the Third Paradise. It is a tool that, when transposed into numbers, reveals that 1+1= 3, which can be exchanged with I+You= Us. You and I, indeed all of Us, are responsible for the society we create. The Reintegrated Apple, by Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the works on display, is also one of the great symbols of Milano (in its definitive location in Piazza Duca D'Aosta), dedicated to the balance between nature and technology, to the sustainable change that can only be achieved through responsible transformation, with art that promotes the interaction of the different sectors of society, from education to nutrition, from architecture to fashion, from spirituality to politics.

The Preventive Peace exhibition extends with three installations in the scientific museums of the Municipality of Milano, Natural History Museum, Planetarium and Civic Aquarium, which will host a series of in-depth meetings during the opening months of the exhibition itself.
Peace thus becomes the common thread of a cultural plan carried out within the social labyrinth, which helps to avoid uncertainties at the crossroads of decisions and take the path of harmony instead of the one that leads to the path of contrast and conflict.