REPORT | ART FOR TOMORROW

This year marked the 10th anniversary of Art for Tomorrow, comprising a range of insightful speakers coming together at Triennale Milano and grappling with the most pressing concerns of our political moment, alongside arresting performances that remind us why the arts are such a powerful tool to mobilize change. Unified under the banner of “Overcoming, Together,” these dialogues convened some of the most innovative creative minds from around the world to answer one principal question: How can art and culture help us to facilitate a better tomorrow? 

Achilles Tsaltas, President of the Democracy and Culture Foundation, opened the event with the mandate, “If we come together as a community and leverage arts and anchor our thinking into the arts and culture sector, we can overcome the problems that our world is facing.” 

Across a range of issues — from culture as capital to art in a time of war — the forum highlighted art’s capacity to confront painful realities, spur collective change-making, and empower us to imagine a way forward together. Thank you to everyone who helped make this event possible!

Community-Based Arts

One highlight of the forum was a panel titled “Going Deep: Community-Based Arts,” featuring artists Alvaro Barrington and Eneri alongside architect Michele De Lucchi and photojournalist Alessandro Cinque. 

According to moderator Roslyn Sulcas of The New York Times, the premise for the conversation was the idea that “an increasing number of artists, architects, and creative figures are embedding themselves in communities.” 

Their dialogue explored the groundbreaking ways each participant is engaging their communities, while probing the question of how to construct art for the people at the heart of a work, rather than a detached depiction of them. 

De Lucchi, founder of the architecture studio AMDL CIRCLE, shared his perspective that “if you want to design something for the world, you have to understand the world, and you have to be open to all the possible faces of the world, [and] all the possible different attitudes.” Alvaro Barrington summed up the discussion with a closing remark: “I think art is always a public conversation about who we are and who we aim to be.” The conversation reinforced the importance of weaving community voices into art, not only to craft compelling designs, but to generate momentum, empowerment, and investment. Listen again to the full panel here. 

Visualizing Inequality

How can we force people to confront the uncomfortable realities we must face in order to move forward? Maybe the secret lies in the ways we present information as well as the aesthetics we wrap around our most difficult data.

This idea was core to a Lightning Talk on “Visualizing Inequality” between Marta Foresti, Founder and CEO of LAGO Collective, and information designer Federica Fragapane. The latter has dedicated her career to crafting visually rich data graphics representing some of humanity’s most pressing issues. Reflecting on her designs, Fragapane stressed that she “wanted to represent the unrepresentable sometimes and to talk about unbearable numbers.” For her, the way data is depicted is everything. “Aesthetics for me have never been a final embellishment or a final touch, but it’s really part of the communication process I’m working on and it’s really my way to invite people to look at visualizations.”

Foresti echoed this sentiment, saying “what we’re in the business of is creating knowledge and intentionally using design to make sense of the reality around us.” If the key to fostering change is encouraging people to face the facts, Foresti and Fragapane’s work teaches us that seamless design is a crucial tool in building awareness and motivating action. To learn more about their work, watch the full conversation here. 

Biodiversity and Technology

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), more than 46,000 species around the world are currently threatened with extinction. Yet the ecosystems in danger also offer a model to help address this crisis by building nurturing networks that co-create rather than eradicate. In the spheres of art and technology, such networks are already in development, with the goal of fueling culture while ensuring the sustainable protection of the planet and the organisms that call it home. 

A discussion, “World’s Imagined: Biodiversity and Tech,” moderated by Louis Jebb of The Art Newspaper, spotlighted four cutting-edge thinkers leveraging art and technology to address the spiraling deterioration of global biodiversity: Susanna Barla, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Beatriz Colomina, and Bettina Kames. 

For Barla, the outlook is clear: “We are not separated from nature — we are nature. We are technology.” 

As one of the founders of Danish art collective Superflex, Christiansen highlighted the symbiotic relationship between art, technology, and nature, saying, “You listen, you learn, and then you cultivate. In the studio we believe in interspecies living, and that the best idea might come from a fish.” Kames in turn discussed the economic promise of co-creation. “I think at this intersection of art and technology, there’s a huge potential not only that art can benefit the greater good, but actually that artists can be entrepreneurs, artists can be innovators.” To learn more about the ways these creatives are leveraging the intersection of art and technology to change the world, watch the full conversation here. 

Public Bodies

In his Spotlight Conversation on “Public Bodies,” sculptor Antony Gormley shared his conviction that the best art invariably relies on collaboration and cross-pollination. “What I want to talk about is the antithesis of the lone artist making their own version of the world in their own time.” Instead, Gormley highlighted “the absolute joy of working together and having the privilege of finding out about new ways of being and doing. New long stories of relationship with material.”

Gormley’s practice has taken him across the world to create sculptures that engage with local materials, techniques, and histories. Critical to his ethos is the belief that art should be publicly accessible, not hidden away in a museum or private collection. 

“We are used to art existing within the safe confines of our fairly self-satisfied cultural context. But there is such a wide field,” said Gormley. “Art belongs in the world. It is an expression of life in all its diversity within the world, and is best seen in the world.” ‍

Listen to the artist’s provocative conversation with Roslyn Sulcas here.