Michelangelo Pistoletto, the Italian artist best known as a leading figure in the Arte Povera movement, may be looking for a second career as a diplomat. He issued a strange open letter to US president Barack Obama and Cuban president Raul Castro on Wednesday, 30 March, encouraging the two leaders to build on the diplomatic foundation established during Obama’s recent visit to Cuba. Raul’s brother, the former Cuban president Fidel Castro, criticised Obama’s trip earlier this week, writing in a column: “We don’t need the empire to give us anything.”
In November 2015, Pistoletto travelled to Havana to host the first Rebirth Forum, which brought together faculty from Cuban universities and representatives from the United Nations to discuss art and politics. Pistoletto, who also participated in the 12th Havana Biennial, says that his foundation Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto plans to organise additional workshops in Cuba “with the aim of creating a network of projects to promote change in society”. Cuba, he writes, “is symbolically and practically the place from which to start over” and restore balance to the world.
The artist feels personally invested in the relationship between the US and Cuba. The day after he organised an installation off the Cuban coast, on 16 December 2014, the two countries announced that they would resume diplomatic relations. For the project, Pistoletto lined up fishing boats in the water to form his rebirth symbol: three circles inspired by the mathematical infinity sign that are meant to symbolise renewal. “This coincidence of events has made clear the congruence between the symbol of Rebirth and the emergence of new geopolitical scenarios,” he writes.
In the letter, Pistoletto recalls a “long conversation” he had with Raul Castro last November. “The president declared himself to be fully in agreement with the import of the Rebirth-Third Paradise symbol, expressing the conviction that it could serve as a guide to the establishment of a new political balance, both locally and globally,” Pistoletto writes. Talk about the power of art.
