Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the northern Italian city of Biella, artist Michelangelo Pistoletto lives in his grandest idea: Cittadellarte. His “city of art” houses both his home and his foundation in a former woollen mill on the banks of the Cervo river. It is also something of a utopian experiment. Its mission? To “inspire and produce responsible change in society through creative ideas and projects”.Amid Cittadellarte’s warren of rooms on a wintry morning, Pistoletto is sitting at his dining room table, positioned between two mirrors. Both are examples of his art, their surfaces superimposed with images. While one shows a woman looking through a pair of binoculars, the other flaunts a hangman’s noose.To enter the room is to become part of a constantly changing performance: members of Pistoletto’s entourage come and go, his wife, Maria, makes coffee, and the 91-year-old, white-bearded and soberly dressed, discusses his upcoming New York exhibition at gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan. “The show begins with a self-portrait made with a reflective material in 1961,” he says. “It is the origin of all my process. The mirror, for me, was a way to make a step to the other side of the wall. You have the entire space and time in front of you.”It was Pistoletto’s sleek, somewhat pop, 1960s “Mirror Paintings” that first made his name; six decades later, the mirror is still a hallmark of his work. It’s been combined with photography and painting in hundreds of different iterations; used to create mind-bending installations; smashed with a hammer in performances; and become a hotspot for an Instagram selfie.For many, though, Pistoletto’s name resonates first and foremost as a leading proponent of the arte povera (“poor art”) movement, whose radical use of everyday materials in the late 1960s and early 1970s is currently being highlighted in a major survey at Paris’s Bourse de Commerce. The artist continues to add to his CV at an impressive pace. Since October, he has headlined shows in London (at Robilant+Voena), Paris (Galleria Continua) and Caserta in southern Italy, where the royal palace is hosting Metawork — a display dedicated to Pistoletto’s explorations of “metamorphosis” and “interconnectedness”.In Biella, his vision that began with the Mirror Paintings — the experience of seeing “the entire society inside of the work” — has expanded into “a place where art would be accepted inside all the different sectors of life”, he says. “In 1991, I found this old mill by chance,” he recalls. Today, the renovated 20,000 sq m space houses a broad selection of his work and is open to the public at weekends. It also has a primary school, a residency programme, and an academy of higher education — its subjects ranging from socially engaged art to sustainable fashion design. There’s a restaurant (Bistro le Arti), an event space (Hydro) and building work is under way to create an on-site hotel, scheduled to open next summer. As well as 50 rooms, it will feature, says Pistoletto, “a cultural spa”. Instead of massages, the “treatments” on offer will be workshops and talks. “You come and reactivate your mind,” he adds.It’s all connected within his concept of the “Third Paradise” — an artistic and activist philosophy, started in 2003, to create “a balanced connection between artifice and nature”. Ultimately, he says, “We have to learn how to create harmony instead of war.” Its lofty goals around unity and environmental sustainability are symbolised in the artist’s adaptation of the mathematical infinity sign with three connecting circles. Pistoletto’s cult-like motif has been recreated in multiple locations and materials — from a floating sculpture wrapped in fabric scraps at Blenheim Palace to a constellation of fishing boats in Havana and installations at the Palace of Nations in Geneva and the United Nations headquarters in New York.He highlights the “spontaneous participation of people” in the Third Paradise, which claims to have more than 250 “embassies” across the world — people who champion its utopian principles. “They each create the Third Paradise as a work of art and each one is totally different from the other,” explains Pistoletto. Since 2012, they have also collectively marked Rebirth-Day on December 21 — the end-date of the Maya Long Count calendar, suggested by some to be the end of the world, adopted by others as a celebration of a new beginning. Does Pistoletto feel reborn? “Every morning,” he laughs. Then he is serious again: “But it is not a question of myself being reborn. It is society starting a new path that is important.”He tells me about a new initiative he and his team (as a non-profit enterprise, Cittadellarte employs some 40 people) are working towards called United Religions. “We have the United Nations,” he says. “Now we want to see how [The Third Paradise’s] formula of differences can find a common balance among religions.”When I suggest that in light of historical and current conflicts, it seems an impossible task, Pistoletto quickly interjects: “Nothing is impossible. If I think that something is impossible, I would not make art. Even if there is not a final big solution, the moment you start to activate something to be better for the future, you feel better.”His Biella base is also something of a personal homecoming. It’s where his parents met, and where he was born. His father, Ettore Olivero Pistoletto, was an artist and an antique restorer, whom Pistoletto worked with from the age of 14 at his studio in the nearby city of Turin. “He was a painter, but very classical, very good, but he didn’t make a jump out of the past,” says Pistoletto. “For me the family is very important.”His foundation, too, is a family affair. One of his three daughters, Armona, is a Third Paradise ambassador who runs a sustainable agriculture project, and her husband, Paolo Naldini, is the director of Cittadellarte. Naldini describes the operation as “like a volcano”. While its network of different offices (for areas such as art creation, fashion, architecture, economy and education) seems sprawling, “it’s actually pretty straightforward,” he says. Its day-to-day running is in the hands of project leaders, called “artivators”. In terms of funding, “two-thirds of Cittadellarte’s finances come from its ability to exchange and sell its projects to public or private institutions,” says Naldini, “and one-third is from the economy of Michelangelo.”Pistoletto’s wife Maria serves as vice-president of the foundation. In New York, the Lévy Gorvy Dayan exhibition includes silkscreen-printed images of the two of them on a mirror diptych. “We are like the first day we met,” says Pistoletto of his partner, in life and work, for 57 years. “We are very different, but we are complementary. I am always enthusiastic about things and she is critical.”In the artwork, they are both looking into their phones, which display a QR code — a new element of his practice, also presented as paintings, from which viewers can access an “extraordinary and constantly evolving autobiographical history of interviews and thoughts”, explains Dominique Lévy, co-founder of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.The show, titled To Step Beyond and spread across two floors of the townhouse gallery space, is, Lévy says, “an exhibition of a very, very young artist who happens to be a 91-year-old man”. One room is dedicated to a new installation of his abstract “Color and Light” series: “To me, it’s really a gesture of hope in quite dark times,” says Lévy. Another will reveal completely new sculptural work: “very much arte povera again, but in an incredibly contemporary way”, she adds.Indeed, Pistoletto shows no signs of slowing down. He continues to go skiing whenever he has time; is writing “many books”; and is embracing the use of AI as a way to “transform the visual infinity that is in my mirror paintings”. Even his time asleep is productive, he says, as it allows for the subconscious reorganisation of his thoughts. “Every day at five in the morning I wake up with the problem of the day before, but in a way that offers a possible solution. My activity never stops.” ‘Michelangelo Pistoletto: To Step Beyond’ is at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York, from January 16 to March 29. ‘Michelangelo Pistoletto: Metawork’ is at the Reggia di Caserta until June 30
