Milan, the beauty of being cool-tural: the challenge of a city-state of the future. Filippo Del Corno, Councillor for Culture, speaks.

Milan is recognized as the economic capital of Italy, and for the past few years it has also intended to assume the role of cultural capital. Not only that: in the last decade, Milan’s international prestige has grown considerably, and as part of the processes of economic, social and urban transformation, cultural policies have played a key role. Milan has been able to understand that a broad discourse on culture can have beneficial effects on the whole city, and that culture is a fundamental lever for the development of a city. A center of European caliber for contemporary art, a multicultural city that is open to the world, a place that attracts a new kind of tourism: we talked about all these topics with Milan City Councilor for Culture Filippo Del Corno. Interview conducted by Federico Giannini, editor in chief of Finestre sull’Arte.

Filippo Del Corno (Milan, 1970) has been the Milan City Councilor for Culture since 2013. A 1995 graduate in Composition from the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan, he has been working as a composer since 1990, and his compositions are always featured in the most important international festivals and theaters. Since December 1997 he has taught Composition: first in Turin, Parma and Pesaro, then in Trieste and then again in Milan. He also taught Economics of Arts and Culture at Bocconi University from 2001 to 2007 and, from 1999 to 2008, conceived and conducted in-depth musical and cultural programs for RAI-Radio3.

FG. We can start by recalling how the European Year of Heritage 2018 was launched precisely in Milan. An important recognition that, I would say, unequivocally certifies how Milan has carved out for itself, in the cultural but also in the economic and social spheres, a leading role in Europe, on a par with capitals such as Paris, London, or Berlin. Milan has in essence become an international cultural center again. How did you achieve this?

FDC. First of all, the whole city has succeeded: I believe that the credit for this process cannot be attributed solely to the administration, but is an overall merit that the city has achieved. I must say that a fairly important starting point was the strategic plan for the development of culture in the city that, as soon as I took office, I outlined in 2013: in the plan I identified three basic axes of development around which the path of this cultural development of the city was gradually built. The axes still remain now, because I believe that this strategic plan is still in full swing: the first axis is the increase of cultural offerings from a qualitative and quantitative point of view, meaning the fact that really the growth of a city can be measured on the thickness but also on the critical mass of its cultural offerings. The second theme was that of increasing the cognitive heritage as an essential factor in the economic and social development of a community, thus thinking about an increasingly wide dissemination and accessibility of city culture also as a foundational factor of economic and social development. The third element of development was based on the principle of creating networks of collaboration and relationship between public and private entities: an alliance, a pact between public and private for the cultural development of the city. Around these three axes of the strategic plan happened, sometimes directed by the administration and in many other cases in an absolutely spontaneous form instead, several facts that led to a really important and significant overall growth, which in turn led both to the repositioning of Milan, not only from a purely statistical point of view, among the first European cities in terms of its capacity for cultural offer and production, and to a new and renewed feeling of confidence that the city has in culture as an element of development.

In fact, and I still remain in the context of the European Year of Heritage, one of the objectives of this initiative is to raise awareness among European citizens about the importance, also social and economic, of a great shared cultural heritage. For years Milan has been focusing on culture, demonstrating that culture generates wealth, not just material wealth. However, this is a rather difficult challenge, especially at a time in history when there are forces that are, in fact, hindering this process of recognizing the value of culture. How can it be addressed?

I believe that, first of all, one must have, more and more, an analytical approach: one must not only think in a fideistic way, just based on the assumption that culture can be an extraordinary driver of social and economic development, but one must sharpen one’s analytical tools to demonstrate the real and concrete substantiation of what might otherwise seem to be just a theoretical postulate. I believe that, from this point of view, a big responsibility that Milan has to take on with a little more strength and relevance is to also be a leader in innovation capacity, using appropriate analytical tools that can demonstrate and substantiate the statement I made earlier that is widely shared. The second point is to recognize what is the actual scope of action of cultural leverage, which is not only that of the measurable GDP points related to cultural production and supply, but constitutes the deeper issue, for me, of cognitive assets. The ability to make one’s community grow through the acquisition of tools of knowledge of the real, and thus the ability to equip it with greater capacity to read the world around us, determines favorable conditions for development. So we need to think that the social capital of a cultural investment is twofold: on the one hand there is the concrete, real and material one that lies in the economic value it produces, and on the other hand there is the intangible one that is linked to the cognitive heritage and has a concrete link with the ability to have knowledge and awareness of one’s present, and greater possibilities to plan and realize a future.

Here, I would like to focus on the “intangible” side of cultural investments. I am reminded of an article in “Le Monde” which, at the end of May, called Milan a “European city that resists populism.” In this sense, what suggestions do you think Milan could make to the rest of a country that often wants to raise barriers rather than build bridges with the rest of Europe and the world?

I believe that the only suggestion we can make at this time is to show how an attitude of trust and openness has meant that in such a recessive and critical economic cycle as the one our country has gone through and is going through, the city of Milan instead marks notable elements of growth, both economically and in terms of employment. A community that opens up, that dialogues, that also allows itself to be contaminated and cross-fertilized by external elements, is a community that is then able to produce growth and development, contrary to what is commonly believed. The second foundational element, and this is the only suggestion that perhaps the city can make even in purely operational terms from the point of view of cultural powers, is that we need to keep the level of political debate high, indeed: we need to stimulate it more and more. That is, it is necessary to make sure that the cultural offer does not involve a mechanism of passive reception on the part of the city, but calls and stimulates the city itself to be a protagonist in a political debate that takes place thanks to the solicitation of the cultural offer. From this point of view, the models of our diffuse festivals, I think of Book City, I think of Piano City, I think of the weeks we launched last year, are productive precisely because they function as an extraordinary activator, throughout the entire urban territory, of places and moments of public debate. Today our country suffers from a lack of public debate, because it is congested in a kind of continuous dialectical challenge that is carried out only through the mechanism, in this case quite perverse, of communication via social, where opinions are viralized and become totems. We need to challenge this totemic conception of society, and instead consider how enriching in every respect is debate, confrontation and thus also, in a sense, the inevitable mediation that must exist between different ideas and perspectives.

Audience at the Castello Sforzesco during an event of the Estate Sforzesca. Ph. Credit Giovanni Daniotti

Talking about culture as a key to integration and inclusion, also in light of recent migration phenomena and Istat statistics that tell us that the number of foreigners in Italy has doubled in just thirteen years, we are used to saying that cultural heritage, of course, is an indispensable basis for building a society capable of inclusion and openness to multiculturalism: how is Milan moving in this direction?

Milan has done two very important and significant operations. One was to establish the World City Forum, which represented a place where all communities in our territory had the opportunity to express themselves, to represent themselves and to cultivate relationships first and foremost among themselves, thus no longer living a principle of opposition between micro-community and hostile external environment, but on the contrary sharing dreams, hopes, expectations, fears and fears through, however, an inter-community flow of sharing. With the World City Forum we have seen Peruvians, Senegalese, Egyptians, Chinese, Filipinos and Moroccans find opportunities for confrontation, relationship and dialogue especially among themselves: this has triggered a mechanism of strong perception of Milanese citizenship, because a person who comes from a distant country shares, with someone else who comes from another distant country, the fact of being Milanese and living in this city. It was a very valuable experience, and now like all experiences that have had a very tumultuous growth it is having difficulties, but on the symbolic level it was certainly very important. The other significant aspect has been giving birth to Mudec - Museum of Cultures, a museum that has developed, beyond its activity of cultural offerings and proposals, the mechanism of in-depth focuses on different communities (Chinese, Egyptian, Peruvian, and so on), and this has stimulated the communities to feel that they are a conscious part of a diverse and jagged cultural landscape, where, however, the city institution recognizes and attributes to those communities a value of significant contribution to this multiplicity of cultural presences. I always say that Mudec has the great merit, or the ambitious task, of generating from the difference between different cultures, a culture of differences. I believe that this, from the cultural point of view, has worked and has contributed to the fact that today Milan is a city that has succeeded in declining the form of coexistence between different cultures in a somewhat more peaceful way than other realities.

Among the achievements that are recognized in Milan is its dimension as the capital of contemporary art. Important synergies have been created, and in Milan both the public and the private sectors are contributing successfully, and in a way that is, I must say, very balanced, to the rise of the city in this capacity: there is no international newspaper that does not talk about the Prada Foundation or Hangar Bicocca, there is Art Week that involves all the institutions of the city, there is a Miart that is becoming increasingly important also in the international sphere, there are realities such as the Triennale and the Museo del Novecento. If, however, we were to evaluate the negative side of the coin as well, I think we should start precisely from Mudec, because from the outside there is the perception that it is a museum that achieves success mainly because it hosts reviews with a strong commercial impact or easy and pre-packaged exhibitions, the many multimedia shows or, for example, the exhibition on Frida Kahlo come to mind. In your opinion, in Milan, the capital of contemporary art, what aspects work and what aspects need to be improved?

I think that the principle of horizontal alliance between the various subjects works a lot. Public and private increasingly contribute to making Milan an extraordinarily fertile city from the point of view of its ability to accommodate contemporary creative thinking. And so the various events and institutions that you mentioned increasingly experience their complementarity in this scenario as a factor of advantage and not disadvantage. I would also unite the fact that, from a merely symbolic point of view, some public operations that have been carried out in recent years, above all the one that is still in the making but which I hope will be concluded by the end of the term, that is ArtLine, the largest contemporary public art park that exists in Italy as well as among the largest and most relevant in Europe, where contemporary art and contemporary art languages have also been given the responsibility of inhabiting a public space and becoming a catalyzing element in the identification of a new function of public space. I always remember, as one of the projects I am most satisfied and proud of, when in 2015, in the midst of Expo, we decided to have Piazza Duomo, that is, the nerve center of the city, inhabited by the presence of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s reintegrated Apple. That symbolic presence also catalyzed a lot of attention about the form that a public space, when inhabited by contemporary art, can take. As for Mudec, I would like to respond dialectically to your remarks on two levels: as far as contemporary art is concerned, I can say that that is not the specific and main mission of Mudec. Mudec interweaves its contemporary dimension with the older and more distant matrices of cultural anthropology, as it does in its permanent collection and in several of its special projects. Also, I would like to dispel the prejudice that somewhat surrounds several exhibitions that are done at Mudec. You, for example, mentioned Frida Kahlo, which was not a prepackaged exhibition, but was made especially for Mudec, by an in-house curator from the city administration, Diego Sileo, with a scientific project that took three years of in-depth research and contacts, which made it possible to bring to Europe for the first time several works that had never been out of Mexican museums, and which related Frida Kahlo’s work, for the first time in a scientifically in-depth way, with the theme of her relationships with her own matrices of a historical, anthropological and artistic nature. Then it is clear that the media appeal of the title and all that is around these phenomena inevitably also reflect a somewhat commercial and hedonistic vision that certain visitors have of this type of operation, but Mudec’s attention to culture is utmost. And it is then certain that in our city, however, there are many things that still do not work in contemporary art. For example, we have to ask ourselves the problem, in a clear way, of how to do justice to the ever-growing private collections of contemporary art, of great quality, which show a generous willingness to be exhibited to the public but which still do not have a location. The real challenge in my opinion is not so much to set up a contemporary art museum (I do not think this is the destiny that Milan requires), but to think of a more different and innovative form: a kind of home for collections, a place that through mixed public-private management can allow the many contemporary art collections, which our citizens have, to express a public function.

Piazza Duomo in 2015 with, on the left, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Reintegrated Apple. Ph. Credit Finestre Sull’Arte

Let me add a coda on the discourse of exhibitions with a strong media impact, but playing on another level, that of ancient art. Here it must be noted that Milan struggles a bit in making its countless treasures known: often even many Milanese find it hard to remember, for example, who Vincenzo Foppa or Bernardino Luini were, and in my opinion in this sense little benefit is served by such questionable initiatives as Christmas exhibitions of individual masterpieces uprooted from their context and brought to Palazzo Marino. In this area, what are the aspects to be worked on, always, however, keeping in mind that compared to even just ten years ago, much has been accomplished?

To answer this question, which very much captures the point, I can say that we have worked on two levels, one symbolic and one of awareness. On the symbolic level we have tried to make the citizens of Milan take more pride in the multiplicity of art treasures that the city’s museums, collections, and art places hold. Just during Expo I launched the project of the six icons of Milan, the six works of art kept in the cities but which were not in fact perceived, starting with the Milanese themselves, as belonging to their own heritage. I recall them in succession: the Fourth State by Pellizza da Volpedo, the Marriage of the Virgin by Raphael, the Kiss by Hayez, the Pietà Rondanini by Michelangelo, Spatial Concept. Waiting by Lucio Fontana and Leonardo da Vinci’sLast Supper. During the six months of Expo I attributed to each month an image, and I promoted the entire communication of the Expo schedule in the city through these six works: from there the project Art Conversations was produced, with which every year we choose (one year it also happened with a popular referendum) six works of art that belong to our collections and toward which we believe it is appropriate for the Milanese to begin to feel even a greater pride of belonging. From this point of view there is certainly much to be done, but I believe that the path we have taken is right and it is correct, and I saw this especially when very young children, coming from different schools in the city of Milan and participating in a competition organized by the Accenture Foundation, based their stories of the city precisely on the identity of Milan experienced through works of art. I was saying, however, that there is also a plane of awareness. Responsibility with respect to the artistic history of one’s city is built progressively. Milan had made some very important steps, from this point of view, in the 1950s and 1960s, but then this aspect became blurred. We resumed the path by starting a cycle of exhibitions that precisely worked on this. I am thinking of the exhibition on the Luini by Giovanni Agosti and Jacopo Stoppa, which involved considerable effort: it was the classic exhibition in which the absence of a highly seductive aspect from a merely publicity point of view actually failed to create, as far as public participation was concerned, as much turnout, but I must say that it was a very important initiative, also because alongside the exhibition we carried out the initiative of the itineraries. All the visitors to the Luini exhibition had the opportunity, precisely because of that exhibition, to be provided with an itinerary that then led them to discover or connect in a deeper way with the awareness of the Luini presence in the city. We did the same thing by resuming the historic exhibition of the 1950s, Dai Visconti agli Sforza: we set up an exhibition with a different and updated curatorial framework but again with an itinerary setting that could then be followed. I think the key is this: on the one hand working on contemporary exhibition projects that focus attention on important figures in the development of Milanese artistic history, and on the other hand promoting a deep connection with the territory. This is true not only for ancient art, but also with regard to figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. For example, I remember the operation done recently by FAI, which in Villa Necchi set up an exhibition on the monument that Arturo Martini executed for the Palace of Justice in Milan, and then produced an itinerary of knowledge of his works. We ourselves, when we did the exhibition on Arnaldo Pomodoro in the Sala delle Cariatidi of Palazzo Reale, promoted at the same time an itinerary on Pomodoro’s works in the city.

What about the merit of the exhibitions about which you are being accused of lacking scientific relevance?

You mentioned the Christmas exhibitions at Palazzo Marino. The original approach was to collaborate with Eni, and those exhibitions were based on a principle that, from a cultural point of view, I myself did not fully agree with, but they certainly had a great publicity impact: great masterpieces from great museums being displayed for the Milanese public. Here, we on this project have made a reversal, making a completely different argument. We worked with local realities in central Italy in such a way as to tell the story of that territory, starting from the symbolic presence of the work that is exhibited at Palazzo Marino, but making an extremely accurate reflection, from a scientific point of view, on the work each time. We chose central Italy because we took on a responsibility of a national nature: we realized that, beyond the large art cities consecrated by mainstream tourism, there is no widespread knowledge and awareness of the extraordinary multiplicity, variety and quality of the heritage that is guarded in medium or small realities of central Italy. We have therefore carried out a project that each time deeply connects territory and work: we started with Fermo, we went on with Sansepolcro, among other things contributing significantly to strongly relocating the identity of Piero della Francesca’s work with respect to his birthplace, we continued with Ancona, this year we will do Perugia. So we have marked a reversal of the trend: the approach of Palazzo Marino’s exhibitions in recent years does not have a striking character, because we have exhibited beautiful works but not “crowd-grabbing” masterpieces; on the contrary, if anything, each time there has been a tendency to introduce lesser-known works, such as Titian’s Gozzi Altarpiece, a wonderful masterpiece but one that objectively does not have a strong media impact on visitors, who thus had the opportunity to discover it and above all to understand its genesis in relation to the territory. Therefore, whenever we do these projects, we collaborate very closely with the home cities. I have to tell the truth: I think they are operations that have a consistency and a very valid approach from the point of view of cultural dissemination.

So criticism is opposed to this popularization value that you mention.

Criticism, however, is useful, because it is also thanks to criticism that we have corrected our course a little bit. Then there was also an obvious fact, that is, Eni withdrew from the project, and the principle of close cooperation that Eni had with some museums was lost, and we had to rethink everything from the beginning. But it was very interesting and very stimulating, and here I come a bit to your initial remarks, that is, about how these initiatives can be useful: in my opinion these initiatives are useful to rediscover one’s artistic heritage. I remember that in the film that accompanied the exhibition of the Gozzi Altarpiece, the curator mentioned at one point the altarpiece exhibited in San Fedele, and a great many visitors, inevitably, finally came in to admire the masterpieces of San Fedele thanks to the solicitations that came from Palazzo Marino.

Queues at Palazzo Reale for an exhibition. Ph. Credit Municipality of Milan

In any case, it must be acknowledged that all of Milan’s cultural initiatives have produced an easily noticeable effect, namely an increase in tourist flows: in 2017 attendance exceeded nine million, a result that improves by more than 10 percent what was achieved the year before. Can we say that Milan, even in this sense, wants to place itself or has already placed itself at the level of cities like Rome, Florence and Venice?

Milan has achieved very important results from the point of view of tourist flows thanks to its growth in reputation, which occurred especially in conjunction with Expo. We have to recognize this aspect, and also learn from it, because it has been a strongly attractive element, which Milan has managed to organize and manage very well, and this also over the span of the various administrations that have dealt with it (it is fair to remember that the first one to believe very much in Expo was Mayor Moratti, who belongs to a political party that is exactly opposite to the one I belong to). I must say that the city of Milan has always experienced in great continuity the idea and the awareness that Expo could be an extraordinary opportunity. When Expo came, Milan was able to play all its cards with great awareness and responsibility to ensure that the city’s overall reputation grew, and that Milan became a desirable destination for a tourism that, however, has very different characteristics from those of traditional Italian art cities. It is a tourism that is much less massified, much more diversified, and above all, it can be said, recognizes in Milan not only the aspect of preservation of art treasures, but its vibrancy of productive fabric. This is very important because it is testimony to the vitality that the city has shown in recent years.

So, we have talked about welcoming, openness, multiculturalism, contemporary art, ancient art, and to all this we could add other areas for which Milan is famous, such as fashion, architecture, design: if we wanted to outline a cultural identity of Milan we would have to start from these bases to get to where?

To get to the point of recognizing an identity trait of the city of Milan, that of having always been an extraordinarily fertile city for creative thought: Milan, in its history, has this characteristic, which like a karst river sometimes goes down a level and sometimes resurfaces, becoming a defining element. If we were to take a census of how many musicians, painters, architects, designers, stylists from the most disparate parts of the world have arrived at some point in Milan, and have found here the best conditions for their creative talents to explode, we would make an immense list. Clearly then there is always the very strong example of Leonardo da Vinci, who lived more than in any other city in the world precisely in Milan, where he found the best conditions for the explosion of his multifaceted creative talent. And then I always give another example that is very dear to me, that of Giuseppe Verdi, who similarly to Leonardo da Vinci, came from a territory that was certainly not far away but nonetheless foreign to the city of Milan, and it was in Milan that he found the best conditions for his talent to explode.

In conclusion: what, on the other hand, will be the main challenges awaiting Milan in the future, in the short and long term?

I believe that in the short term the real challenge is to preserve this reputation, this sense of desirable destination that was mentioned earlier, not only from the point of view of the immediate tourist flow, but also from the point of view of the destination of life projects or investments. Today we see that the most dynamic realities from an entrepreneurial, planning and even artistic point of view put Milan on the map of cities where it is desirable to invest and place one’s business and future. So Milan, on the short term, must be able to maintain this reputation and continue to be a destination considered desirable especially for those who want to invest in the future and the development of their business and experience. In the long run, I believe that the real challenge that awaits Milan is to be among the first cities to experience what it means to be a city-state: I am increasingly convinced that Jacques Attali is right in his book A Brief History of the Future, when he says that the future that the generations of our children and grandchildren will experience will be one in which nation-states will have less and less importance and less and less power, and instead the nerve centers from the point of view of decision-making power will be, on the one hand, the large supranational entities, and on the other hand, the great cities of the world that will increasingly take on the contours of real city-states. I believe that Milan is today, among the cities of Europe, within the ranks of those that will play this role. City-states will not necessarily be capitals, but those cities that are investing in a certain kind of growth. Today Milan has a lot of traits in common with another city that is not a capital, Barcelona, but it too has this destiny and this possible ambition to be among the first cities that will experience in a very concrete way, I hope in a sufficiently dialectical and non-impositional way, this idea of transferring more and more weight and decision-making power from nation-states to cities.

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