ART FOR BUSINESS ON AIR
At last here we are! Are you ready? We wait for you on friday and saturday at the Triennale of Milan for 2 days of active seminars, workshops and inspirational experiences with art.
A unique opportunity to know the experiences of managers who are used to collaborate with artists, to participate in exciting workshops with artists, but especially to get close to the languages of arts in a whole new way!
Welcome to the fourth edition of Art For Business Forum … we wait for you!
DESIGNING THE PRESENT
Chris Bangle is one of the most important designers in the international scene. He has become famous for his exceptional achievements as Head of design department at BMW.
Bangle will liven up the second evening of Art for Business Forum and his speech will focus on a very simple question: “How can the vision make business increase?”
Using different examples coming from the world of car design and from the world of art and applied creativity, Bangle will lead the participants in a journey through visual thinking and he will answers to the questions made from the audience using drawings that he will made “live”.
NEW VISIONS: THE PATHS BEGINS TO TAKE SHAPE
“Arte Povera: 1967-2011″
In Arte Povera the artistic experience is considered the experience of feeling and the way of living; the art works become sensory extensions that the viewer is invited to share. This is what we will experience in the New Visions project: we will visit the exhibition with all the participants and through the observation of some works we will try to create a relation between art and life, in particular between art and organizations.
The visit will be interactive and engaging, we will move away from the artistic and historical perspective, to think about issues related to our everyday life and to the working environment, according to the thought of representatives of Arte Povera: involving the viewer in an active process looking at the union between art and life.
TELLING THE PRESENT
FRANÇOIS JULLIEN: LEARNING THE PRESENT, RECOGNIZING THE CHANGES
What are the changes more difficult to recognize? What, however, those that occur in such an obvious way to leave us without words?
The first category includes small and slow changes that characterize our daily lives, those that we do not notice. Think about the gestures we make at work: these, as well as the way we relate to colleagues, always seem to be the same. It’s a way of doing things that is cemented in our habits and found a reference in the organizational contexts in which we operate. And in this way everything goes on, apparently identical, unchanging, silent, concealing a hidden change that we will see only when its consequences will become blatant. On the other hand we have the so-called big events, the changes that seem to occur suddenly, full of pathos and able to cause a strong emotional involvement. The sinologist François Jullien says “Today the privileged place of the liturgy of the events is the media, who consume them all the time to get ratings. Their purpose is not so much the information, but the theater production of the pathetic from a sequence of events. The unexpected and dramatic onset of an event is the best we can be to win the audience on an emotional level. It is evident that this way to face the reality is unable to be interested in “silent changes”.
Combining the two types of changes come to mind images of the many managers who, for the last time, come out of the largest U.S. companies, the symbol of business, published in 2009 in all the newspapers as a striking example of the ongoing crisis. These photos bear witness to a sudden change or to the effects of a slow transformation? At first glance, they may have given the impression to belong to the first category, but this happens only because the “silent changes”, that have characterized the life of these organizations and the way their people work, have remained hidden for a long time until it exploded suddenly. This case represents an example in a broader and more complex system: in any organization, especially in times that are still in crisis, silent transformations characterize the life and everyday of people who work there.
The lecture “Learning the present. Recognizing the change“, that will be at the Art For Business Forum on Friday the 18th of November, will focus these themes. François Jullien will offer an original confrontation between the Eastern and the Western thought. In his view the Western thought is unable to think of the continuing developments and to recognize the changes; it is able to feel them only when, to use a metaphor, “the jar is full.”
The point of view of the French sinologist will confront with the views of some representatives of the cultural, research and business worlds.
Jullien will dialogue with Odile Decq (architect), Renzo Libenzi (General Manager of the Loccioni Group) and Enzo Rullani (Director of T. Lab of CFMT, a laboratory on the economy of the intangibles and innovation in services).
FRAMING DECISIONS: THE PHOTOGRAPHY AS DECISION
A lesson about decision-making through the use of metaphor will take place during the Art For Business Forum on the 19th of November at La Triennale di Milano.
We will analyze our point of view to focus it and overcome the usual solutions to understand the complexity.
EXPLORING WORDS
The exploration always born from a need and a wish to find something.
Some people start to explore looking for adventure or knowledge, or because they need to move from an area that is no longer safe or productive.
The seminar “Exploring words, that will take place at the Art For Business Forum, comes from this conviction: today managers need to explore distant lands to find stimuli, ideas and skills to manage the organizations out of the doldrums in which they are increasingly exposed.
In each exploration we know where we start, but we don’t know the point of arrival. For people who live in contemporary organizations the only fixed point is the need to observe their own reality with new points of view, the points of view of those who have been in places that they rarely planned to attend.
A such dangerous journey needs a guide. That’s why we invite six guides to take part at the seminar.
This year we will hear the architect Odile Decq, the poet David Riondino, the theater director Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, the designer Mauro Sargiani, the orchestra leader Gianandrea Noseda and the artist Cesare Pietroiusti.
They will take us in complex and fascinating territories, places that managers are used to explore, but of which they might not have the right awareness: Courage, Misunderstanding, Instability, Game, Detail, Pleasure
FROM SPONSORING TO LEARNING
“A child plays with a dog, but the dog looks somewhere else. There is no game or caress able to attract its attention. The child tries everything, without success. This is not a real dog, flesh and blood, but the baby is having fun with the plaster cast of a dog lying on a bench.
The dog depicted here belongs to “One of the families of Trivero, a small village nearby Biella in Italy. This work is dedicated to this family and to the people that will sit here”.
We are facing an artwork done by the artist Alberto Garutti for the project “All’aperto“, promoted by the Fondazione Zegna, of the homonymous textile group, settled in Trivero.
This is one of the forms in which today takes place the collaboration between the arts and the enterprise: giving back to the territory in which the company is based growth and cultural opportunities, social welfare, beauty, meaning”(quote from the text “Five reasons to invest in culture“, edited by Art For Business for the Annual Report of Sponsorship 2011 of Il Giornale dell’Arte).
The seminar “From sponsorship to learning”, that will take place during the Art For Business Forum, will be developed from this experience, in order to analyze the relationship between Art and Enterprise, still largely unexplored.
A dialog to show, from the experience of those who field-tested, what happens when the Human Resources Department works with the artists and the language of arts. What are the objectives? What are the results?
To answer this question we invite Jens R. Jenssen, Special Advisor at Statoil and leader of Statoil Art Programme, one of the most important European companies in planning and implementing training for their employees from the works of its art collection.
Why do training with the art? “The art has new perspectives and helps us to shift the meaning of our actions, offering unexpected points of view. Tanks to this approach, called art-based learning, the languages of art become methods to work on skills, competencies and behaviors within the organization. We are anesthetized, we must be awakened and brought into question. It’s time to ask artists for help because they can offer new opportunities to face organizational problems by comparing their approaches and their practice with the mediation of facilitators or moderators ”
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF CONTEMPORARY ORGANIZATIONS?
During the opening of the fourth edition of Art for Business Forum we will analyze the state of contemporary organizations with the speakers Emilio Petrone (MD of Sisal) and Peter Jarre (Vice President of Business Development at Golder Associates Corporation).
The start point of our discussion will be the tightrope walker.
Why the tightrope walker? The are at least two answers. First of all, the tightrope walker has the need, more than any other person, to live his present with particular care in order to keep the balance without which he would fall. Secondly, the tightrope walker represents a virtuous precariousness because he is constantly suspended between conflicting and contradictory forces.
In my experience so far the contemporary organization appears to be suspended between a past that will not come back and a future not yet likely. The company strategy today has lost its confidence in the business tradition which uses to aspire to a scientific organization of work and with hope and fear it looks to a different future, in which the impossibility of accurate predictions is replaced by the ability to improvise, to reinvent and to leave promptly the models that reveal to be not effective.
In this uncertain balance, the contemporary organization is precisely located on the threshold: on one hand, the “no longer”, on the other “not yet”. What should be done in this situation? What style of management is necessary to pull off? What references can be offered to people who expect to receive directions and guidelines to create value? How do we intend to carry with us the past and what experiments are we able to open up?
This and other issues will be discussed at the Art For Business Forum.
GETTING READY FOR THE FORUM
Just over a month to the Art for Business Forum… how exciting!
While waiting to meet the speakers personally, we surf the net and read newspapers to look for news about them.
What did we found?
Woman Magazine published an interesting article about Odile Decq, that made us even more satisfied about our choice: she is the right person to talk about Courage. Odile doesn’t give up her profession, “although today not many women choose to interpret themselves the hard path of architecture from freelancers. Certainly she doesn’t lack the courage and the tenacity needed to interpret the daily battle, and perhaps a good dose of recklessness.”
We also traced the design of the table that the designer Mauro Sargiani drew on the occasion of the Art for Business Forum. The speakers’ table, in fact, has been designed especially for this occasion, full of secrets, of things to discover and learn.
As will happen during the Forum, where each seminar will be open with a musical moment, to tune the thought, we leave you with Ferdinando Faraò.
Ferdinando Faraò quartet + Ralph Alessi (video: Lorenzo Fodarella)
