Michelangelo Pistoletto and Terzo Paradiso at SSE
Title: Third Paradise
Artist: Michelangelo Pistoletto
Date: November 2024
Technique: Books from the SSE reading project the Literary Agenda
Displayed in: The atrium of Stockholm School of Economics
Made in co-operation with SSE students from the Art Divison
As part of the conference The Bureau of Poetry, Michelangelo Pistoletto came to SSE for a talk and a performance in cooperation with the students in Art Division. Togehter they created the Third Paradise out of books from the school´s reading project the Literary Agenda. The Literary Agenda is a large book circle project that aims to promote self-reflection, empathy and cultural literacy among students.
Terzo Paradiso/The Third Paradise is a long-term artistic and philosophical project by the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, a founding father of the Arte Povera movement. The Third Paradise is a collective work that allows participants and others to think about, imagine and create a future where we can live together.
Ever since 2003, when Pistoletto wrote the manifesto of The Third Paradise and drew its iconic symbol, a reconfiguration of the mathematical sign for infinity, it has it been a symbol of the connection between nature and artifice. It´s a reconfiguration of the mathematical infinity sign, made of three consecutive circles.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, born in 1933 in Biella in Italy, is a contemporary artist, painter and sculptor, known for being part of the Arte Povera movement. He worked under his father in Turin from 1947 to 1958 as a painting restorer. In the 1950 and 60s he started making figurative paintings, including self-portraitsand photo-silkscreened images of people, life-size and on reflective steel, were intended both to integrate the environment and the viewer into his work and to question the nature of reality and representation. Mirrored surfaces recur throughout Pistoletto’s oeuvre.
Also in 60s Pistoletto began to pursue performance art, an interest that would expand over his career to encompass film, video, and theater. Pistoletto presented collaborative “actions” meant to unify art and daily existence, these performances took place in his studio, in public institutions such as schools and theaters, and on the streets of Turin and other cities.
In 1974 he passed a ski instructor’s exam and spent much of his time in the mountain town of San Sicario.
He has participated twelve times – from 1966 to 2011- in the Venice Biennale, and four times in Documenta in Kassel, from 1968 to 1997.
In 1996, Pistoletto founded the art city Cittadelarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, hosted in a discarded textile factory near Biella. Conceived as both a centre and workshop, it aims to bring art into different spheres of society, in order to inspire and produce responsible social change.
Pistoletto’s engagement in social issues and his interest in symbology prompted the artist’s most recent artistic phase, Third Paradise (begun in 2003), and his envisioning of the new infinity sign.
Pistoletto lives and works in Biella and Turin.
Michelangelo Pistoletto outside Stockholm School of Economics in November 2024.
Photo: Mikael Olsson/Handelshögskolan i Stockholm