Our corporate philosophy is in some way consistent with the product we offer. First of all, we are a “stakeholder company”. In other words, we are conscious of serving all those stakeholders with whom we interact on a daily basis: the consumers first and foremost, then customers, collaborators, suppliers, and the communities we have dealings with.
Rather like an inverted pyramid, at our company shareholders rank last of all these stakeholders. Unlike what normally happens in a “shareholder company”, in which the shareholder reigns supreme, we set ourselves the objective of improving the quality of life for all our stakeholders.
We do this by following two principles: on the one hand, a passion for excellence, in the sense of a love for the beautiful and the well-made. On the other hand, ethics, in the sense of creating long-term values through transparency, sustainability and developing people.
As a whole, this is a truly sentimental, almost romantic vision! This is exactly why we were encouraged to convert – with tongue only slightly in cheek – the famous “four Ps of marketing” into the “four Cs by illy”. The first of these “Cs” is Cuore (“heart”), in other words the passion of each one of us, through which we want to delight the second “C”, i.e. our Consumers. If they are happy, their repeat purchases will generate Cash (the third “C”) which the company needs for Crescita (“growth”, the fourth “C”), which is our reward for a job well done.

But where does this heart, this passion, come from? First of all, from our personal motivation, and the mirroring of personal values with those of the company. These prepare the intellect for those states of mind which, as stated by the great neurophysiologist Antonio Damasio, are nothing but stored emotions that are reawakened by day-to-day experiences, generating visceral sensations that are then decoded by the brain. In the final analysis, emotion is what releases the momentum that helps us work towards improving the quality of life.

The art of surprise for starred chefs is much more difficult. They are confronted with palates that are not exactly “virgin” – it’s hard to surprise someone who already has a galaxy of references for comparison. Here, surprise becomes a pyrotechnic battle: the international school of consistencies, siphons, foam, liquid nitrogen, alginates and the new generations of thickeners from methylcellulose to xanthan gum. It is a philosophy of stands, containers, packaging and food design: take for example the Catalan chef Martí Guixé and his techno-tapas (fooddesign. com); or the Frenchman Marc Brétillot and his vertical hors d’oeuvres created for parties – alias “Mise en éspace de la nourriture” – or the “ergonomic” millefoglie designed for “La Grande Epicerie” in Paris (marcbretillot.com). It is more than just a race between chefs anxious to amaze, to conquer the undiscovered virgin territories of the taste buds and cross new frontiers in terms of what has never been seen, eaten, or imagined before.

There are surprises that amaze, and surprises that excite. Although the first type almost inevitably rely on the never-seen-before, the unexpected, the second variety act on a mechanism described by screenwriter Tonino Guerra as follows: “We keep eating our childhoods all our lives”. Summarised in pictures, a surprise which excites is the pen dropping from the hand of egocentric Anton Ego, food critic of the cartoon Ratatouille, staggered by the memory of a flavour that suddenly took him back to a moment in his childhood.

Yet, Anton Ego himself (his character is a hotchpotch of peculiar traits of well-known food critics from various different countries), on his return to the restaurant after having experienced this emotion, issues the challenge: “Surprise me!” He doesn’t say “Excite me!”: he wants amazement. The choice of word is important. Despite the cartoon scenario, the authors of this script show that they are very familiar with the world of haute cuisine, its dynamics and its faces, just as they are familiar with the mechanisms of surprise and excitement.

Surprise, in the words penned by Panella for the songs of Lucio Battisti, is “a collection of things and non-things that happen once. They can be repeated on request and not by chance”. What has surprised us once has gone for ever. That grain of fleur de sel hiding under every flake of chocolate on the dessert Plénitude by Paris chef Pierre Hermé surprises us – the first time. It is still delicious even on the next occasion. But the essence of surprise lies in that undiscovered region of the palate that lies between the unexpected and the never-seen-before. Surprise is the orange jelly that tastes of beetroot and the purple one that tastes of orange (Heston Blumenthal, The Fat Duck, Bray-on-Thames, UK); it is the “vegetable coal” made from manioca coloured with purple corn (Andoni Luis Aduriz, Mugariz, Renteria, Spain); it is the pasta “d’uovo” (made from egg yolks) instead of the classic egg pasta (Carlo Cracco, Cracco, Milan, Italy). But surprise is also the smoking Vesuvius of maccheroni (Alfonso and Ernesto Iaccarino, Don Alfonso, Sant’Agata sui due Golfi, Amalfi Coast, Italy), the fragrance of peperoni cruschi (sun-dried peppers prepared by the Fischetti sisters, Oasis-Sapori Antichi, Vallesaccarda, a mountain region behind the Amalfi Coast, Italy); ravioli filled with cacio cheese and pears (Lidia Bastianich, Felidia, New York), the contrast between courgettes and sausage (Carme Ruscalleda, San Pau, Sant Pol de Mar, Catalunya), gnocchetti made with ricotta and semolina flour (Antonella Ricci, Al Fornello da Ricci, Ceglie Messapica, Apulia, Italy), the sweet salad of roquette and pink grapefruit (Cristophe Felder, Atélier Felder, Paris), the gazpacho of clams and cherries (Albert Ventura, Coure, Barcelona, Catalunya), the vanilla stockfish (Jordi Butron, Espai Sucre, Barcelona, Catalunya), a spoonful of chocolate flavoured with the brackish taste of sea urchin Un pezzetto di cioccolato dopo una gita in barca (Carmelo Chiaramonte, Il cuciniere, Catania, Sicily, Italy), or the beetroot and liquorice dessert (Fulvio Pierangelini, Gambero Rosso, San Vincenzo, Tuscany Coast, Italy).

A surprise that excites may lose the power of amazement it had the first time, but never its emotional charge, which is enhanced with fresh nuances, each time acquiring a depth we did not notice the first time around. The emotion similar to the instinctive amazement – and perhaps the imperative “surprise me!” of the blustering Anton Ego – alludes precisely to this, and embodies the awe inspired by remembering a childhood emotion. “Eating your childhood” implies a connection with our emotional side, not the rational side slavishly disposed to filing things away under the headings new and familiar.

If we can learn an empirical rule from all of this, it is that surprising is a technique, exciting is an art. If the aim is merely to surprise, a professional always knows how to achieve it, but a dish created in the wake of an emotion we want to share is surprising in itself, and does not lose its power after the first time. It acts on a deeper level. The dropped pen is a smirk of sentiment to the categories of reason. Thinking about it carefully, it is a pen that drops when confronted with the memory of simple flavours.
Unmistakeably close to the ingenuous goodness of a dish well cooked by an unsuspecting housewife.

Is there a conflict between emotion and rationality?
Emotions affect our decisions much more than our rational thoughts do – and not because we are irrational. In most everyday situations, we do not have enough time to gather all the information we need before deciding. For example, faced with a barking dog, it is “rational” to follow your emotions. Emotions also save us from certain limits of logic: if I like someone, before asking them out, I could write down all the pros and cons on a piece of paper. But that would hardly be appealing to a prospective partner. Emotions and rationality alternate and complement each other all the time – they have a strange kind of alchemy.

Emotions have always been the prerogative of artists and literary types, but not of scientists…
About fifteen years ago, various scientific disciplines began studying emotions all at about the same time. This is because they found it impossible to explain human behaviour without talking about emotions. Above all, there were the neuroscientists, who studied people incapable of feeling emotion due to brain trauma. They saw how our emotional side can really help us to make the right decisions. Excellent results have also been obtained in the field of artificial intelligence, in terms of building robots which incorporate mechanisms that mimic emotions.

Are emotions innate, or are they products of culture?
Joy, fear, anger, suffering, surprise and disgust are primitive emotions, a kind of universal language. They are innate, and we all have them, regardless of our race, age, or level of education. Smiling at people generally triggers a positive response. The same applies to music, which tends to have a positive effect on mood. But different cultures can generate very different ways of thinking and feeling. This is also true of the link with triggering stimuli. Faced with a number, for example, we might be happy because it reminds us of the number that won us the lottery – or we might be sad because it makes us think of someone who’s died.

Is there a hierarchy of emotions?
Higher cognitive emotions, such as love and hate, need more time to how themselves compared to the basic ones such as anger or surprise, which are instinctive responses to a stimulus. Higher emotions tend to resemble a state of mind, rather than an emotion in the truest sense.

Films, commercials and the media subject us to a constant bombardment of stimuli. Does the level of surprise have to keep on rising to excite us?
Nowadays we have become desensitised to stimuli that were once unknown. A child used to listening to hip hop or heavy metal on his iPod is unlikely to be moved by an old piece of classical music. There is an increasing need to be amazed by speed, rhythm or exciting graphics. There is now also an established idea that things aren’t interesting unless they are constantly updated.

You call yourself an evolutionary psychologist…
Emotions have been a fundamental part of our evolution because they have directed our decisions towards things that allow us to survive. Take high-energy foods, for example, a quick way of enabling us to store resources we need to survive periods of hardship. Evolution played its part by making us sensitive to those tastes, urging us to look for them when they were in short supply. Of course, now that all we need to do is open the fridge, things are a little different. The obesity epidemic is proof of that.
The same applies for food that’s harmful to our health, such as food that has gone off: the aversion we feel is due to its smell, unpleasant taste or appearance, which triggers a sense of revulsion in us that has developed over time.

Can we live without emotions?
No. Without emotions we would never have evolved. Dr. Spock, the Vulcan of Star Trek, could not experience emotion. In reality, he could never have existed.

Interview by Mauro Scanu

By listening to her dual nature, she achieved a rare ability to invent mental “micro-climates”, opportunities to avoid the here and now and enter the “forever”. However, a listening, thinking mind should not aspire to the noisy confusion of large events but should introduce small ideas. These ideas then generate transformations, tiny but active, nourished by that special form of attention: “making yourself available, like paper”.

There is nothing heroic about it: “see small, hear small and think small”, she writes on those pages typed between 1952 and 1964. Even today, in her book The other rooms (2009), she invites us to listen to shadows: “People need shadows in order to rest. I’d like you to send a bunch of shadows to a friend”. Silent shadows which could be the faces of people loved and lost, but also the shadows created by the sun in a room, which become three-dimensional before our eyes and therefore a welcoming space filled with emptiness created especially for us, a space we can fill with our bodies or thoughts.

Listening to birdsong means understanding what the emptiness of the sky contains: life. Ono’s short film Outro consists of a single image coming in and out of focus. It shows Ono, Sean as a young boy, and John Lennon in a garden, a family appearing and disappearing. It is already in a void, or no longer exists, but the game of disappearing images is guided by the constant presence of the birds.

John Cage, her lifelong friend, also dedicated one of his most famous pieces to birds. The same birds who represent the sound of the skies and also of emptiness, and which represent the soundtrack of silence. We all know what idea Cage had of silence, as he even tried looking for it inside an anechoic chamber and was forced to accept that in the absence of any sound, we hear at the very least the blood flowing through our veins and the beating of the heart. Silence, the music consisting of a rest sign written on a fiveline stave, is nothing more than another anthem to listening, to the noise of the heart, the noise of emptiness, the fullness of meaning we can achieve even when there are no more words. We should mention at this point that Japan, a significant influence on both Yoko Ono and Cage, is a universe in which the kind of silence aimed at listening to the rustling of a falling leaf is much more highly regarded than it is in the West. In this fluctuating world every moment comes and goes, and it is worth remembering this even by just concentrating on the noise that consumes it.

We should remember that ancient practice brought back in vogue by Yoko Ono: the wish tree. It can be an olive tree, a maple or even a simple wooden panel bedecked with handwritten notes declaring our wishes. The artist arrives and gathers them all up, as with the Wish Tree at the 2003 Biennale, makes a small bonfire and delivers them up to the dustbowl of the world. Burning them is not intended to be an offence, but a way of perpetrating our wishes. We, who expressed these desires, have another powerful ritual at our disposal to help us achieve them: not magic, but listening. By writing down what we want, by hanging up that note, we have had to focus on an emotion, a future prospect. Nothing, other than understanding, re-reading and listening to our desire, can help us realise it. Yoko is not a witch, she is an elderly fairy, who now has the wisdom to help us listen to what we feel.

Hey Jude, don’t make it bad
take a sad song and make it better
Remember to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better
…
The Beatles, 1968.

Certain places excite me more than others. When I visit them, I am reconnected with a very personal, familiar, dreamlike memory, and I feel a great tenderness and vulnerability. It is as if that emotion is generated by the coincidence with a past that meant something, that was shared; the smells, colours, rooms, lighting, the ways of talking or behaving, the eyes of the people with the same landscape imprinted on them.

I am deeply affected by light and colour, and the way they define a place, and by sounds and air and the way they penetrate the intangible.
The quality of these things determines the quality of the emotion – joyful, melancholic, cold or lukewarm. It fluctuates up and down – one of its main functions is to show us how unstable we are, how relative, compared to time and space. They allow us to lose ourselves and then make us work to find the right direction again.

Emotions are profoundly sincere, but in the present time, they are mobile. They can be fleeting, darting, generating an immediate and instant response (like fear) that is sometimes inaccurate. They are like a sketch, an initial idea, the first draft of a project, something that guides us, rightly or wrongly. There is something romantic in this that cannot be defined as a method, but when a clear idea appears before us, it is a moment of grace – everything comes together harmoniously and finally takes flight, like the first step of a dance. It’s hard not to join in.

The idea that a project feeds on people’s collective emotions is nothing new. The great thing is the stubborn resistance that this aspect offers, in such an artificial, technological environment. Excitement becomes a ritual; we want to experience it again; we can even recognise it through a computer screen. It has a personal dimension and a collective one, like experience, and it expresses itself sincerely, before it is overlain by thoughts. The first sensation we feel when we share an emotion is that we are not alone – it is a moment fixed in time, a moment that becomes sacred and will be repeated whenever we properly recreate that experience again.

I believe that the main difference between excitement and wonder is the actual physical or intellectual effects they have on us. Emotion brings about a reaction in our bodies. It is a real, sensory experience that changes our biochemical set-up even just for an instant, a pleasant thrill or an annoying shock. Then it transforms into an idea and becomes part of our intellect, but first it is felt like warmth or heat, it is not a sentiment but a direct perception that makes us feel alive (Think about the work of Bruno Munari – the inclined chair for very short examinations. There is nothing abstract about it).

Things, like people, can encapsulate elements that generate emotions. If they contain love and care, an urge to overcome our limitations, then the experience we have will probably be interesting and positive. These positive emotions are light sources – tiny stars that can illuminate certain dark areas of our existence, that are hard to reconcile with logical thought. They traverse culture at all its levels, sometimes cancelling them out.

The conscious use of language can inject a soul into the objects presented to us, establishing a special harmony between the designer and the user, encouraging a closer, more enlightened relationship.

Sometimes in the world of design we speak of playful, a poetic, lighthearted vision of irony; it shows us a different perspective on things, it escapes rhetoric and lets us talk about anything and everything, augmenting our perception of reality. It helps us overcome our fears, shared by many people, and magically connects us. Poetry and subtlety tell us the history of an object, they reveal things through emotions and the fear of our ungovernable nature acquires a harmless face. Sometimes, this is also the route towards functional and typological innovation.

What is the relation between surprise and emotion as related to Art?
A lot of contemporary art relies on the shock of the initial moment, the moment when you come through the gallery door and are amazed (or delighted, or stunned, or shocked, or embarrassed, or bewildered). Some Renaissance art is like that as well – Titian’s Assumption in Venice, Michelangelo’s ceiling… but as a generalisation: surprise is a characteristic of postmodernism. A shark in formaldehyde! A dog, as big as a building, sprouting flowers! After you see the dog, you can learn, slowly, to love the dog. But usually people don’t linger over postmodern works: they are amazed, surprised, astonished, and they move on.
There is a strong reason for this. Western art has moved in an arc, from a kind of seeing that was slow and careful, to one that is fast and often careless. In the past it was more common for an artwork to ask its viewers to linger, to get to know it, to sit and ponder and not to move on. In order for that to happen you have to forget yourself: you have to forget you’re in a museum or a church, and you have to forget your lunch appointment, your work, your family. You have to be immersed in the artwork, and it has to hypnotise you. In modernism and postmodernism, there is a different theme at work: the artwork shocks you, astonishes you, etc. – and those emotions make you think of yourself. You are aware of yourself seeing, you think of yourself thinking, you watch yourself reacting. And in those dynamics, no immersion is possible. All that is possible is increasing surprise.

You wrote that nowadays we all suffer from an “emotional arthrosis”. Do you think the emotional climate of our times hinders us from feeling deeply in front of Art?
I think it’s partly the climate of museums, not our culture. Museums are so bright and busy that it’s hard to feel much of anything. My advice: go late in the day, and go by yourself.

What do you mean when you say erudition kills emotions? Does the large quantity (and low quality) of information we get make us unable to experience surprise as an opening towards emotions?
People have told me that idea (that erudition kills emotion) is wrong. My colleagues in art history invariably say they feel a lot when they look at art. But I don’t see much evidence of it. When you know a lot about an artist, it can help you to feel something when you look at their work. But when you know a lot about artwork, it’s different. When I look at art, sometimes the patronage, history, provenance, market value, symbolism, narrative structure, geometry, geography, colour theory, perspective, conservation, scholarly debates, ideology, politics, all get in my way.

You wrote that painting strictly links the fleeting moment to the infinite duration. Moment and duration: what is the importance of Time in accepting and developing emotions?
Many people feel strongly that the paintings on their walls will not change. They will grow old and die but their paintings and sculptures will not. And if the artwork is damaged, it can be repaired. People can’t always be repaired, and in the end none of us can be. That feeling makes many people love their artworks even more intensely, more devotedly.

Do you still feel emotions are central in your work as an art historian and as a person who writes about this?
I am working now on a book about mediocre painting, like Sunday painting, amateur painting, tourist painting. I am interested in it because there are many ordinary, not-so-good paintings done all around the world, and people really care about them. There must be tens of thousands of people who paint: painting is part of their lives, and they care deeply about painting. I am trying to take those emotions seriously, to understand them and to write about them. It is not only great art that produces great emotions.

Interview by Lilia Ambrosi

In general, where is collaboration most likely to occur in the art world and what, vice versa, arouses competition among artists? What’s at stake? Is it ideals, visibility, the market?
An artist as such tries to keep competition at bay. The world is already rife with it as it is! An artist delves into the origins of things, strives to feel a part of the world at large, reaches ever out and beyond. This may lead to performing extreme gestures, such as Van Gogh cutting off his own ear. But this sort of extreme gesture is not motivated by competition. The artist is not interested in confronting other artists as such, in beating them on the market. He’s simply sending a message, giving an image of himself.
I’ve often corresponded with friends and fellow artists and discussed with them, sometimes apologetically, about the dramatic times my generation has been through. I’ve talked with them about our faults and failings but also about our good qualities, about what Italy was like at the time. We’ve exchanged views on what our theatre was like, on the battles we fought. In mutual exchange of points of view the artist may be said to be collaborative. The artist is a story teller who recounts a community’s history, what it possesses that may be deemed beautiful, while at the same time bringing out into the open the apprehensions that grip those who belong to the community.

A journey entails casting doubts upon one’s deeply held beliefs. The next step is the creation of an image that is as much self-revealing as it is enlightening of the intrinsic value of things. I’d say this is what artistic competition essentially amounts to. It might be considered as a competition of ideas, or rather of the archetypes all artists work on as icons for conveying their ideas. I don’t really see it that much as a struggle for notoriety or leadership on the market.

In what way, if any, does the work of an artist differ from any other?
The first trade in history can indeed be said to be that of the artist. Cave paintings are there to prove it. The values of this profession were established there and then, in deep and secret recesses in pre-historical times.
It’s a trade quite unlike anything else. A man is born, a very curious man, and then illumination; the rest is idiom.

What do you mean by the idiom?
Painting is a matter of idiom. Cubism is an idiom. It’s all an idiomatic process.
Artistic endeavour is not so much aimed at working out a modality or style as such but at creating a unique image, unrepeatable and clone-proof. Mind you, we’re living in times of idiomatic fragmentation. Community identities are being torn asunder by globalisation.
And yet civic awareness and concern are important at some stage of the artist’s development. 
A cohesive national community heightens the artist’s awareness of the other. It’s important because it contributes to the essence of art as social practice, for the artist is essentially a soft caring voice telling a harsh and often indifferent story. But no, the artist cannot be made to fit into neat categories!
Nowadays there’s a lot of talk about generations. I’m convinced though that it’s not all that decisive. We can’t say now what the future holds in store. At the moment the prevailing opinion is that we’re living in an age of absolute artistic innovation. But what does all this originality really amount to? Thanks to my long years of university teaching in Germany I’ve many young friends and I can say that I honestly don’t think they’ve sprung from nowhere. They’re no different from so many others, carrying forward the same values as their forerunners. It’s not all that remarkable after all. As artists they’re indeed rooted in the past; there’s no way they can be wholly “new”.
But an artist is also cohesive with the basic values of her/his space-continuum. Beauty is a good example. A person can start out looking good in the morning and end up looking horrible at the end of the day. In this case, beauty depends very much on the time of day. Long-term beauty is art’s prerogative. It’s a very real instantiation and yet it holds a perennial value. Beauty is born and reborn an infinite number of times.

Interview by Elisabetta Lattanzio

Olafur Eliasson is to know that if you paint a river of green perhaps it hurts

www.olafureliasson.net

For me, the expression of emotion is never calculated.
I’ll wager that emotion is always there if the work is motivated by pleasure and desire. Since I often have too many ideas or desires, I usually start each project with endless lists, which I then cut into little strips and arrange in order of preference to make choosing easier. I usually adopt a process of elimination, automatically rejecting the less appealing ideas, and also the ones that seem to be less well-suited to the material requirements: timeframe, budget and so on. Sometimes, I have a strong desire for a certain idea that stands out from all the others and this means the elimination process is unnecessary.
My lists include several categories: ideas, but also material details about the project, and finally “models”, the names of artists I admire. Thinking of them encourages me to start work.
That’s why I also do a lot of documenting. From my library, I choose books that inspire me, I look at them (many at a time), without dwelling on them, but “thinking in parallel”, in a state of passive alertness similar to what you might feel when listening to music. I might even spend long hours in bookshops doing the same thing.
When it comes to work, I can’t stand doing the same thing twice.
My lists, which I keep, contain lots of ideas that haven’t yet seen the light of day. I hope I live a long time, so I can make many of them reality.
Sometimes this disheartens me, because each new project generates new lists, which means new ideas. Maybe I’ll sell them to a young artist one day, like a businessman might sell his shop, or a notary his mandate.
There is a virtue to sifting through the little strips I form from my lists which is similar to the experience described by Matisse when he said you need to “exhaust the painting”.
In practice, after noting, cutting, sticking together, I often find that I’m starting out on a long journey, where intuition is strong from the outset, towards ideas that gradually become more complex, only to return to my initial vision, but this time it has been enhanced by all the side-tracking (I think of this wonderful quote from Picasso: “It takes a long time to become young”).  Also, it’s not uncommon for ideas that might seem incompatible at first glance, to merge together. The ostensibly very simple finished work has been enhanced by all the meanings gathered along the way.
This preparatory stage, when note-making is more important than drawing, has the same effect on me as a map has on a traveller. I define, delineate, mark boundaries, start getting to know my terrain, and this reassures me and tells me that it would be easier for me to get lost with rather than without a map. Indeed, even though this research phase might last a long time, I never know where I’m going when I start out. I never have the sense of the precise direction of what I am undertaking, the direction always unfolds unexpectedly, depending on how I manipulate the shapes, the materials. I never illustrate predetermined concepts. The concept and the direction always emerge from the action. When I put my notes aside and move on to the materials, they themselves dictate their own logic and a direction I hadn’t thought of before. In this way, my notes are similar to Le Corbusier’s Modulor, an effective tool for designing façades. But if intuition invites you to depart from the rules, you need to follow your intuition and not the Modulor.
In another context Churchill said (I love quotations, I think you might have gathered that. They give me the same comfort as the models on my lists). “A plan is nothing, the planning is everything”. The use of chance, which I often resort to, helps to distance me even further. However precise the project may be on paper, even when I draft detailed projects and plastic models (I always construct plastic models on a scale of 1:20 when preparing my exhibitions), the final result is always a surprise. This surprise is even greater and further removed from the project when I create “participatory” works to which the public’s contribution adds an unpredictable dimension.
In short, when it comes to art, it is not the initial intention that matters.
It’s the same thing in life, wouldn’t you say? You can’t understand your own life before you’ve lived it. I called a recent exhibition “Deinde
philosophari” (you need to live first and philosophise later): it was a large game of construction made up of small quadrangular shapes which the visitors could use to build houses, cities, streets, bridges or anything else.
My favourite quote is from Paul Klee: “what I do teaches me what I am looking for”.

illy will be present at the international art exhibition of the Venice Biennale for the fourth time.

THINK WITH YOUR SENSES, FEEL WITH YOUR MIND. ART IN THE PRESENT.

Is the title of the 52nd International Art Exhibition curated by Robert Storr and organised by the Venice Biennale chaired by Davide Croff. Installed at the Arsenale and Giardini, it features the work of about a hundred international artists. “This exhibition looks to the future, not the past”, is how Storr defines the broad scope that places all the guest artists and their works on the same level. Each work is there to speak for itself and for the whole display, the similarities are designed to highlight the diversity of emotions, materials and subject matter featured in works of different styles, related to the present day.

77 countries and a large number of spinoff events will be presenting their works in the city centre, the Giardini and the Arsenale, where the new Italian Pavilion curated by Ida Gianelli will be inaugurated. At the Arsenale there will be a Turkish Pavilion and Check List of the Sindika Dokolo African Collection of Contemporary Art curated by Fernando Alvim and Simon Njami. At the Giardini, the Venetian Pavilion presents a tribute to Emilio Vedova. The Venice Biennale is offering an invitation to the general public, together with Art 38 Basel, documenta 12 and skulptur projekte münster 07, with the home page www.grandtour2007.com, and the catalogue for the 52nd exhibition is published by Marsilio.

We had a coffee and an interesting chat with chairman Davide Croff, on the subject of sentimental-mente…

You are a manager: a graduate in Business Studies and Economics, Director of financial Affairs at the fiat Group, CEo of the Banca Nazionale del lavoro and now Chairman of the Biennale since 2004: these all seem to be roles in which emotion plays no part. Is that true?

I’m afraid I have to disagree: every job, even in the business world, contains a high emotional charge if it is done with passion, and out of passion.  I’ll give you a personal example: my 10 years at FIAT, apart from the rich and varied professional experience, were characterised by an incredible passion for the “car product”. Unconsciously, the car was the real reason why I started at the company, and it bolstered my enthusiasm and enjoyment in the years that followed… Another piece of my life: BNL, 20,000 employees, a professional bank which is deeply rooted in the history of Italy, open to the world, and all the staff have a very strong sense of belonging. 14 years after I stopped working there, I think that all my colleagues will remember the misty eyes of their managing director during the last meeting.

But let’s move on to what I’m doing now: at the Venice Biennale, emotion is the real core business.

We offer pure emotion: with a modern art installation in the gardens, a large architectural project that might soon go down in history, a world film première at the Lido, a theatrical performance in a local field, modern dance, a concert, and why not, the photographs of our past and the great names of our history.

As you can see, emotion is a common theme that runs throughout the whole of a manager’s career, even though it might take different forms.

The result of an institution such as the Biennale comes from the work of a strong, enthusiastic team. how, and with what means, can you motivate the team?

We often think that the main motivational tools available to a manager are salaries, bonuses and stock options. They are certainly important. But the things that allow you to build a team are credibility, your powers of persuasion, enthusiasm and most of all, having clear ideas about how to direct the team’s work.  The salary at the Biennale isn’t that high, there are no real bonuses to speak of, and there are no stock options, so people with responsibility have an even more important role to play in terms of providing motivation.

A team is not just the sum total of individual and professional abilities. It becomes a team when it manages to express something that goes beyond individual contributions. Everyone has his own qualities and his own story, which is why relations should always be calibrated to suit individual personalities. The “chief scout” has to be able to lead the team as a whole, to communicate with and handle each man and woman on an individual level.

I’ll give you an example of the human machine that is the real strength of the Venice Biennale: the 24 hours leading up to the great event, when a world made up of a thousand people unites and pulls together in an incredible way.

If you walk past the gardens or the Lido a day before opening, you’d probably think those doors were never going to open…

But this is where everyone’s generosity, ingenuity and enthusiasm come in. People on all levels give of their best, in the firm belief that the success of the exhibition, event or festival represents the success of all those involved. Everyone’s needed, even those who make only the smallest contribution.

The strength of the team at the Biennale (I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them), is precisely that: they have a solid vision, they know how to accept and handle a challenge, and they keep their nerve. We will keep going as we always have done, on a never-ending quest for new ideas. During an architecture exhibition, we work on the next art show, while putting together ideas and links to the dmt festival or the film festival. To get the motor running and engage the gears, you need intellectual ability, certainly, but also emotion. Always.