Today humanity has descended into an immense labyrinth built on a global scale. In front of us is the monster: we cannot confront him with the ways he himself used; we must render him harmless aware of our ability to create new methods that avoid wars and put an end to those still in progress.
Pistoletto begins the text of his book The Third Paradise (Marsilio 2010) with these sentences:
“It was March 2003, when Bush and Blair, supported by numerous governments, declared pre-emptive war on Iraq. The circumstance caused me a deep disturbance. What was happening was the culminating stage involving the entire human race. It was the overflow of “political” perversity from the vessel of history, a planetary aggression added to a series of opposing, monstrous aggressions....
...All the cultural malformations inherited from the past were coming to the boil: the very concept of preventive war gave rise to the pressing need to counterpose the idea of Preventive Peace. In history peace has always come as a result of war and has been regarded as its outcome, thus war hidden under the guise of peace and peace constituted of mere appearance. I realized at that moment that I myself, despite my artistic, intellectual and practical efforts directed toward a responsible transformation of society, had to take one more step, even more decisive and effective, to contribute to the change of this humanity. This is how the sign of the Third Heaven was born.”
The sign of the Third Paradigm is the symbol that indicates the new path of humanity. It is the mathematical sign of infinity reconfigured into three consecutive circles. The two outer circles represent all the antinomies, that is, all the different, opposite and contrasting elements, in the middle circle these meet and connect creating, always, a new element that did not exist before, thus it is creation.
The Formula of Creation is the book (published by Cittadellarte 2022) that Pistoletto proposes as a fundamental reference text for the realization of the path that leads humanity towards the exit from the labyrinth dominated by the Minotaur and immunizes it from the war that continuously feeds on it, engulfing it.
Preventive Peace is a commitment that artists, through their disciplines, make. At each bifurcation, of the labyrinth, art and practice will proceed by connecting the two possible directions to open at the center a new, previously nonexistent way, that of Preventive Peace.
An artist cannot change the world alone, Pistoletto calls out loudly to artists and society as a whole for active cooperation in exiting the labyrinth of the Minotaur.
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