Futuro Antico. Interview with Michelangelo Pistoletto

In an era defined by post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still hold strength?

When we talk about post-truth, we refer to the kind of truth posed by religion as a connecting element. Unfortunately, this truth cannot be verified—we can rely on stories and the truths they convey, but we can no longer speak of an ultimate truth about existence. With the need to investigate the unknown, science has gradually replaced religion. To verify contains the word “truth,” and this is why we can rely on science, which verifies every step of what it declares. The path of verification includes a concept of truth that phenomenologically leads to the real. In this new context, art is essential because it is the artistic dynamic that breathes life into both imagination, which was once religiously transcendent, and into today’s immanent spiritual concept. The word "sacred" is a bit dangerous because it makes us think of sacrifice, and that’s what Christianity used to unite people. People need something to unite them, and religion (from religare) means to bind, but we must be careful not to let it become something else: relegare—that is, to close off into defined paradigms that are often opposed to each other. As artists, we want to move beyond religious wars and work toward a responsible future. The word "sacred" can make sense if we think of it as the element that unites the physical with the metaphysical. Art is metaphysical because it doesn’t stop at thought, but moves us beyond reality only to bring us back to it. For instance, in the mirror painting, we no longer have the gold of icons (which spoke of transcendence and suggested something extraordinarily distant). Instead, we have a surface that cannot lie, distort, or change meaning. The mirror painting reveals the truth about things—not the ultimate truth, but the truth of continuous change and the ongoing relationships of changing things. We must embrace the extraordinary freedom that modernity has granted to the artist. But this freedom and autonomy must also connect with the concept of common freedom. There must be an interpersonal connection that creates society—this is crucial because no man stands alone, and individuals must connect with others to build a society that is artistically and scientifically linked to a new way of thinking.

How do you imagine the future? Could you give us three ideas that you believe will guide the coming years?

I would gather the three ideas into one: investment. We must invest in three essential elements: cultural investment, economic investment, and socio-political investment. We are talking about a necessary radical change, but we cannot cut off the returns from the investments made thus far because that would ruin millions of people. However, we must start making different economic and cultural investments that foresee a potential return in the future. We need to start imagining investments that, instead of damaging the planet, heal it. Profit doesn’t need to change; it just needs to improve, meaning it should become broader—not just economically but also culturally and socially on a planetary level. The virus teaches us that there’s nothing today that cannot become immediately planetary. We cannot think that part of humanity is dying of hunger while another part can afford to destroy it. The desertification of certain parts of the world affects us because it causes the migrations we experience from those countries. While we have defended ourselves from the threats nature creates, now we must defend ourselves from the problems we have created ourselves. My advice is to protect ourselves, but to do so by imagining humanity and nature as if they were one body.