From the Bottega
to the Cantiere:
Alternative Pedagogical Sites in Italy from the 1970s to the 2000s
Sharon Hecker
Abstract This essay examines three Italian art pedagogy experiments (1970s–2000s) linked to Arnaldo Pomodoro, Luciano Fabro, and Remo Salvadori as forms of expanded social practice. Through workshop (bottega), academic lectures, and Cantieri models, they each develop an “interior scaffolding”: a relational support structure shaping artistic knowledge beyond instruction. Drawing on archival and oral histories, the essay situates them within transnational pedagogies while challenging heroic authorship narratives.
Keywords Art Pedagogy, Expanded Social Practice, Interior Scaffolding, Collective Learning, Italian contemporary art
Sharon Hecker, Ph.D. is an art historian and curator specializing in Italian modern and contemporary art. She authored A Moment’s Monument. Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture and curated exhibitions on Rosso (Harvard Art Museums and Pulitzer Arts Foundation). Publications include Postwar Italian Art History Today (with M.R. Sullivan); Apollo and Daphne: Luciano Fabro and the Feminine; Curating Fascism (with R. Bedarida); Remo Bianco, la plastica e il trauma dell’artista italiano del dopoguerra. She curated Manu-facture: The Ceramics of Lucio Fontana (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice) and is editing the catalogue raisonné of Camilla Adami. She teaches at universities across Italy and serves on Scientific Committees (Fondazione Remo Bianco, Gianfranco Baruchello), and on boards including CAA, Sculpture Journal, and ICRA; she is Editor of Bloomsbury’s Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts series.
How to cite
Sharon Hecker, “From the Bottega to the Cantiere: Alternative Pedagogical Sites in Italy from the 1970s to the 2000s”, in Raffaele Bedarida (ed.), We Don’t Need No Education. L’educazione dell’artista e per l’artista dal dopoguerra a oggi, monographic issue of Senzacornice Journal. Studies on the contemporary art system, second series, II, 2, September 2026, pp. 74-97, <https://www.senzacornice.org/portfolio-articoli/hecker/>
«Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding».
Seamus Heaney, Scaffolding, 1966
Introduction
This essay examines three Italian experiments in art pedagogy that re-imagined approaches to artistic education, spanning from the 1970s to the 2000s. It contends that these initiatives, associated respectively with Arnaldo Pomodoro (1926-2025), Luciano Fabro (1936-2007), and Remo Salvadori (1947-2026), can be understood as models of art education conceived as expanded social practice. These three cases articulate divergent pedagogical formats: a workshop model grounded in the reinterpretation of artisanal metalworking traditions, in which the Renaissance bottega is reactivated as a site of technical and historical transformation; an institutional pedagogy embedded within the art academy, where lectures and critical reflection foreground conceptual and phenomenological questions about artistic responsibility; and a more recent model of temporary “worksites” (Cantieri), where collective writing and exercises in perception and self-reflexivity generate situated forms of learning outside stable institutional frameworks. Across their differences, these cases are linked by the idea that artistic knowledge emerges as much through relationships formed in shared pedagogical settings as through formal instruction.
While historically and institutionally distinct, these three practices converge in their attempt to construct what this essay terms an “interior scaffolding”: a flexible structure of support through which artistic competencies, ethical orientations, and forms of attention are shaped through shared practices and carried across different contexts of artistic work.1 As conventionally understood, scaffolding refers to a temporary, external support erected during construction and dismantled once the building is complete. In conventional education models, it is likewise understood as externally provided instruction that is withdrawn once the student has graduated. In this essay, the concept emphasizes forms of support produced and maintained collectively that are neither fully withdrawn nor fully internalized, but continually reconfigured. Rather than marking a simple transition from dependence to autonomy, scaffolding here describes an ongoing field of relations that continues to organize artistic practice beyond the pedagogical setting.
In situating these Italian experiments within a broader transnational genealogy – including the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, the Subjects of the Artist School in Greenwich Village, the post-studio pedagogy of CalArts, and Joseph Beuys’s pedagogical practice – this essay does not propose a linear history of influence. Rather, it juxtaposes these Italian cases as parallel reconfigurations of teaching within specific contexts. These contexts were shaped in the wake of pedagogical and institutional critiques that emerged in Italy around 1968. At the same time, the Italian experiments introduce distinctive inflections, particularly in their sustained negotiation between artisanal memory and tradition, institutional critique within Italian art academies, and experiments with collective authorship.
This essay avoids reproducing celebratory and hagiographic narratives of artist-led pedagogy. Instead, it builds on art historian Giorgio Zanchetti’s observation that postwar Italian art history has often been shaped, both positively and negatively, by simplified narratives of heroic authorship.2 The essay relies on oral history and archival traces to foreground the social entanglements, pedagogical infrastructures, and distribution of authority underpinning these experiments.3 Rather than examining these cases in chronological order, I have chosen to begin with a materially-driven example, then move to one in which there is an emphatic focus on ethics, and finally to a case where the very definition of the artist is reimagined.
The Bottega: Material Memory and Collaborative Pedagogy
One instance of experimental pedagogy was the Centro TAM (Trattamento Artistico dei Metalli), which operated from 1991 to 2014 in the village of Pietrarubbia in the Montefeltro. Conceived by Arnaldo Pomodoro as a school for the recovery and reinterpretation of ancient metalworking techniques, TAM positioned manual skill as a method of inquiry into both material and cultural memory. Its significance lay less in the individual artist than in the school’s approach to transmitting artisanal knowledge through collaborative, historically informed learning [figg. 1-2]. By emphasizing the material qualities of metalwork, TAM offered a framework for examining the boundaries between artistic and artisanal labor, while generating spaces for active student engagement. Here, pedagogy operates less as instruction than as an embedded system of support in which technical processes themselves function as a form of distributed guidance. In this sense, TAM can be understood as constructing a form of “interior scaffolding”, in which support emerges through shared practice rather than only being imposed externally.
fig. 1 Pomodoro with students at U.C. Berkeley, Summer session 1970
Courtesy Archivio Arnaldo Pomodoro
fig. 2 TAM, 1991. Photograph: Ermanno Casasco
Courtesy Archivio Arnaldo Pomodoro
The school’s pedagogical strategy combined the preservation of traditional know-how with contemporary artistic practice. Students and instructors participated in hands-on exploration of metallurgic processes, from molding to casting to finishing, alongside theoretical seminars in art history and aesthetics, as well as lectures on what was termed «anthropology of materials»,4 thereby bridging craft practice and critical reflection. Workshops included traditional exercises in plaster modeling and molding, cuttlefish-bone casting and surface patination, with the expectation that students should use established artisanal techniques for further experimentation.
TAM can be seen as an effort to move beyond traditional Renaissance workshop hierarchies of master and team of apprentices. In place of a system that produced a unified “house” style through a strict division of labor, the school proposed a more fluid and dialogic structure of teaching and making. This reflected a negotiation between inherited workshop structures and the institutional frameworks of late twentieth-century cultural production. It also rethought the traditional role of the master artist. Accounts of Pomodoro himself from the 1950s and 1960s, including those by Guido Ballo and Gillo Dorfles, emphasized Pomodoro’s capacity to move freely «in the realm of matter»,5 and noted how his works recalled «foundry debris»,6 constructing an image of the artist as heroic modernist master making his works alone. But this image contrasts with the realities of the collaborative conditions of production that occur within the artist’s workshop. Production depended on a network of technical specialists – modelers, founders, chiselers, and patinators – whose expertise shaped outcomes alongside the artist’s design. Pomodoro saw his own workshop as what he termed a bottega, invoking a historical model that had long organized Italian artistic manual labor from the Renaissance and required artisans to work in a specific style, but he reinterpreted this concept in new terms, framing it as a social space of relationships, dialogue, and conviviality that would extend to the conception of TAM. Whereas in his studio artisans were required to work in a certain way to produce a unified work for him, at TAM Pomodoro encouraged students to maintain an openness to all artistic languages and media. He noted:
«My advice to young sculptors is to follow their talent without fear, to engage in serious and original research, and to always experiment, making absolutely free use of various forms of expression – including video and performance art… The important thing is to avoid purely sensationalist, repetitive, and commercial approaches that cater solely to the fads and tastes of the moment».7
Pomodoro’s earlier use of cuttlefish-bone molds – an ancient goldsmithing practice that he learned in his native Emilia-Romagna – was frequently cited as a meaningful reference point by both instructors and students at TAM. Pomodoro insisted on the connections between his return to the goldsmithing technique as a site of artistic and pedagogical origin and the early Renaissance guild of goldsmiths’ workshop (oreficeria), from which sculptors like Andrea del Verrocchio and Lorenzo Ghiberti, painters such as Sandro Botticelli, and architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi emerged. Likewise, his idea of the Renaissance bottega related to the same concept of origin. It illustrated how inherited methods could serve as sites of transformation. What one might term an artwork’s «material memory»8 encompassed historical recovery and the phenomenology of making. At TAM, it provided a material basis for the forms of shared support described here as interior scaffolding. Students internalized a model of recovery of an ancient technique that could then be used for further experimentation [fig. 3].
fig. 3 Arnaldo Pomodoro and students at TAM, 1991. Photograph: Ermanno Casasco
Courtesy Archivio Arnaldo Pomodoro
Pomodoro’s reasons for founding TAM reflected a dual approach to materials and techniques. He acknowledged the necessity of preserving both the “magic” and workshop knowledge embedded in the creation of an artwork, thereby ensuring that the result appears complete and impressive. At the same time, he recognized that knowledge of sculptural techniques could not remain confined within his studio or the experience of trusted collaborators; otherwise, it risked being lost. TAM was conceived to instill in other artists the same respect that Pomodoro held for ancient artisanal practices, framing them as both continuity with tradition and a site of renewed inquiry.
Notably, Pomodoro’s concept of the school as a collaborative bottega space for artmaking did not begin in Italy, but rather during his international experiences on the West Coast of the United States, beginning in 1966, as an artist-in-residence at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Mills College.9 Students of the Berkeley program, such as Dwight Baker and Owen Laub, recounted one unusual instance of a 24-hour “endurance” art lesson that Pomodoro was allowed to conduct in order to fulfill the teaching time requirements without staying away from his work commitments in Italy. The emphasis was on communal process and affective engagement as pedagogical tools. Baker recalled the sense of surprise he and his artist-classmates shared at Pomodoro’s unexpected focus on collective experience. This episode is important not only as biography but as an early instance of collective, process-based pedagogy that would later be formalized in TAM.
«The first day of class Pomodoro explained some of the processes and techniques he used for his work. He also encouraged us to be thinking about a class project. He wanted us to make an artistic expression as a collective community. I was unprepared for this, thinking we all would be working on individual pieces…The course began with Arnaldo explaining the “cuttlebone technique”, a method that spawned Pomodoro’s exploration into not only jewelry making, but many of his larger works. We spent time in the foundry making small castings, using cuttlebone as a mold. Working with papier-mâché, we explored shapes and forms. These activities constituted the first half of the class. Next, we started meeting in “breakouts” to discuss creating a collective piece to be displayed outdoors on a common lawn adjacent to the classrooms. This was a challenge given the diversity of temperaments, ideologies and styles for the groups. One day Arnaldo announced that one of our classmates, who had recently returned from the Vietnam War, had committed suicide. Apparently, he had cast his burial urn at the foundry several weeks before. The class project unfolded as an expression of frustration and protest. The creation of a multitude of headless bodies strung along a line with a loop-like noose reflected the discontent the students at Berkeley were feeling at the time. A never-ending war in Vietnam. A confused society, where mindless, self-destructive decisions were being made. A headless horseman mentality, where mistakes from the past never die, but always haunt the living».10
Pomodoro’s extended time spent teaching at these US universities led him to conceive his subsequent founding of TAM in Italy as a pedagogical and social experiment. TAM instructors, many of whom were also artists, described themselves as «friends»11 who, alongside Pomodoro, embarked on a shared journey to educate new generations in a manner they felt was distinct from what traditional art academies offered. The recollections of former student Chiara Monetti confirmed this approach. She recalled that she had learned about TAM after she finished her academic studies: she felt that the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera was quite traditional in its emphasis on copying from models, but it did not offer instruction in metalworking or foundry-based sculpture. After reading an advertisement about TAM in the local paper, she applied and was accepted. Classes at TAM were small, with about twenty students.12 Teachers encouraged the exchange of ideas, and the warm, collective environment felt to Monetti like a second family, unlike the academy, where she perceived little emphasis on fostering human interaction and relationships. This sense of communal support extended beyond their studies at TAM: students were required to complete internships and often were hired in Pomodoro’s studio. Monetti was one of these students. This approach indicates that pedagogical support was not withdrawn after studies were completed but rather re-situated within professional and social structures. In this way, TAM demonstrated continuity between education and professional practice, reinforcing the close personal artistic bonds that defined it. Monetti recalled that Pomodoro’s rigor and work ethic were among the qualities that inspired her and her peers, and that both TAM and his studio came to function as an extended family.13 Here, pedagogical support persisted from educational to professional contexts, exemplifying the durable, relational structure of “interior scaffolding.”
In a broader sense, the stated goal of TAM – to «counter the tendency to marginalize the skill of craft», and to «recover and preserve a great cultural heritage that is at once technical, inventive, and creative»14 – aligned with earlier postwar Italian initiatives to reconcile cultural continuity with modernization. While the discourse of recovery positioned craft as a repository of authenticity in an era increasingly oriented toward industrial and conceptual practices, TAM’s collaborative ethos extended beyond preservation, as repeatedly emphasized by instructors and students. Sculptor Giovanni Gentiletti, a TAM instructor, recalled: «Together we shared tensions, efforts, and joys, aware that we were living a unique experience and building something important for ourselves and for others».15 This account confirms an environment oriented toward collective engagement, while still maintaining space for individual vision.
International comparisons, mentioned by Pomodoro himself as sources of inspiration, can be drawn between TAM and earlier experimental institutions such as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. The workshop and the artist-craftsman served as an important historical model for the Bauhaus, as evident in Walter Gropius’ concept of the Werkstatt.16 As Howard Singerman has shown, the word bottega was important for art educators in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s, who argued for training artists in colleges rather than professionalized art schools.17 For other countries, the term functioned as an imported model. For Italian artists, the word bottega resonated naturally as a form of continuity with its own cultural tradition. In many cases, the modern bottega became associated with anti-academic and process-based approaches. TAM, however, placed comparatively greater emphasis on technical and aesthetic experimentation within a framework of cultural preservation. It thus offers a basis for reconsidering the ever-more commodified model of artistic identity that emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
On the relationship between craft and art, Pomodoro stated:
«The most delicate execution, which involves specialized work, has always been performed by skilled artisan goldsmiths. The difference between artist and artisan is significant; it corresponds to the difference between art and craft. But the social role of the artisan and their way of working is fully dignified. The artisan objectifies, in the objects they produce, their inventive and labor capacity. Even if their objects are repetitive, meaning similar to each other, they are never identical, never mass-produced. And the manual skill inherent in artisanal work is of considerable importance in artistic production today. The artisan can also find practical-technical solutions that improve durability and performance on certain materials, while the artist, through their specific work, aims to use experience and manual skill for technical-expressive discovery».18
Accordingly, Pomodoro considered TAM essential as an educational environment: «Especially today, in contrast with the trend toward marginalizing artisanal activity, the TAM Center aims to recover and preserve a great cultural heritage that is at once technical, inventive, and creative. And also to go beyond it».19 In discussing TAM, philosopher Eleonora Fiorani has observed that «materials are semantically charged and played».20 Her words suggest that to learn to sculpt is also to learn to think through matter. Fiorani’s emphasis on the agency of materials situates TAM within broader postwar debates on phenomenology and making, and underscores how material inquiry intersects with the social and historical dimensions of artistic labor, a subject that has gained increasing methodological traction in recent fields of Material Studies.
TAM closed in 2014 due to lack of sustained institutional and political support. Elements of its pedagogical mission continue through the Education Department that Pomodoro established at his Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan. Since 2007, it has offered public workshops in plaster modeling, casting, engraving, and printing. These initiatives maintain engagement with Pomodoro’s methods, now adapted for broader audiences within the formal framework of a foundation rather than a self-contained school or workshop. While the programs extend elements of the bottega model, they adapt it to a contemporary setting, where participation and authorship coexist within new institutional forms. The foundation’s overarching goal is to ensure that art and art-making move outwards, beyond elite circles, providing
«an opportunity for social as well as territorial regeneration, in line with the declared task of its founder: to continue activating experiences directly where his works are located, to educate about artistic-cultural heritage, creativity, and freedom of expression through direct and concrete engagement, building an ever-expanding network of collaborations with institutions, organizations, and public and private associations».21
As Pomodoro himself wrote:
«I believe that an artist cannot shut themselves away in an ivory tower but must, on the contrary, be engaged with and immersed in society: this is an ethical issue that has always been close to my heart. From this conviction arose the idea of establishing my own foundation—a dynamic institution, free from any purely conservative mindset, and capable of fostering a deep and international connection with the public. In addition to promoting my work, my Foundation aims to support young artists, particularly those engaged in research and experimentation with the expressive language of sculpture and seeks to be a laboratory of ideas and initiatives, a place for encounter and participation».22
The legacy of TAM raises questions about how material knowledge and artisanal skill can be transmitted within increasingly standardized, commercialized, and digitally oriented art systems. More broadly, the TAM story functions as a point of reflection on the conditions under which collective pedagogical practices can survive, adapt, and transform in contemporary art education and cultural production, and on how forms of “interior scaffolding” might be sustained within these changing conditions.
The Brera Lessons: Ethical Awareness and the Responsibility of the Artist
Whereas TAM emphasized a separate school for material knowledge as a form of collective learning, another experiment, begun in the 1980s within the academy, shifted attention away from processes and techniques of making toward individual perception, Socratic questioning, and ethical responsibility as forms of thought grounded in artistic practice. At the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, Luciano Fabro’s teaching offered a pedagogical model in which autonomy and philosophical, critical reflection became central to the learning process. In this context, “interior scaffolding” operates through language, critique, and intellectual exchange, which shape how artistic practice is understood and enacted.
The contents of Fabro’s lectures have been gathered and published both by Fabro himself and posthumously, although they have yet to be the subject of sustained critical analysis.23 Given the constraints of this essay, such an examination lies beyond its scope. The section that follows gives a sense of how classes were structured and focuses on how students recall their experience. Rather than measuring its success through outcomes, Fabro’s pedagogy is better understood through the forms of responsibility and critical reflection it demanded of its participants.
Fabro had not attended art school but had completed classical and pedagogical high school. He taught at Brera from 1983 until 2002 [fig. 4]. He was an established artist at that point and decided to take on teaching in order to transmit knowledge to young artists. As he frequently said, this was not an economic solution but rather a moral choice.24 He was hired based on what in Italy is called chiara fama (clear reputation), a form of academic appointment based on recognized professional achievement. This mechanism existed in Italian academia, including the arts sector. He had also taught for a period at the Accademia di Carrara.
fig. 4 Luciano Fabro teaching at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, November 1993. Photograph: Mario Gorni
Many of Fabro’s former students, who later became not only artists but also teachers in art academies, recall that his arrival coincided with a period when Brera remained steeped in traditional modes of instruction such as copying from plaster models and memorizing anatomical terms. Teaching curricula were not regulated. One former student recalled a class in which they were required to copy from photographs of famous artworks torn from books rather than drawing from live models or real artworks in the adjacent Pinacoteca. During Fabro’s time, there were also other teachers who were considered interesting: the artist Alberto Garutti, as well as Diego Esposito, some of whose students became known artists, including Roberta Silva and Vanessa Beecroft. Alongside them were several influential figures in art history and criticism at Brera, including Francesco Poli, Francesco Porzio, Tommaso Trini, Giovanni Maria Accame, Francesco Leonetti, Andrea Del Guercio, Roberto Sanesi, and Daniela Palazzoli, whose teaching and critical work shaped the intellectual environment of the academy even when it remained formally conservative in its pedagogy.
Students who chose to attend Fabro’s lectures sought a more disruptive and challenging approach. They came from vastly different social, cultural, and economic backgrounds. Some were beginners with no prior training, while others already had experience working in artists’ studios, other art academies, or Brera itself in different classes. The artist Bernhard Rüdiger, raised in Rome, recalled that he had considered studying under Gerhard Richter in Germany but heard about Fabro’s lessons and decided to sit in on one. He reported that he understood nothing of that lecture, and for this reason felt compelled to enroll. While waiting to be accepted onto Fabro’s course, Rüdiger attended other classes at Brera and found them antiquated and dry in their approach. He was eventually accepted into the course.
Similarly, the artist Gianni Caravaggio discovered a German translation of one of Fabro’s theoretical books, Aufhänger, and after reading it decided to travel from Germany to Milan to attend his courses. In this book, which is neither a narrative nor a programmatic text on art, Fabro investigated perceptual experiences and explored how they produce meanings through a viewer’s philosophical and intellectual encounter with a form in space.25 Earlier, Caravaggio had spent a year studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and had become quickly frustrated by the traditional teaching methods and assignments. He felt that Fabro’s open, dialogic approach to art was better suited to his needs. Another Fabro student, the artist Liliana Moro, who recalled having finished a «disastrous» first year under Brera professor Saverio Terruso, noted: «When Luciano Fabro arrived, a wave of energy arrived, almost like a breath of fresh air».26 This common perception stemmed from Fabro’s introduction of contemporary ideas which seemed to completely unsettle the academy’s conventional notions of teaching art. The open theoretical lectures were well attended, drawing an audience of 150-200 students. As he noted in the introduction to his published lectures in Arte torna arte:
«These lessons are only a small fraction of the ones I’ve actually taught; they don’t even reflect my teaching style, which is based largely on observation and practice, because they deal with a third topic: judgment, and as such, they must be viewed with some distance».27
As often cited, Fabro’s first lecture, titled Che fare (“What to do”), articulated the ethical and conceptual stakes of his pedagogical approach. The question functioned as a provocation to open a pedagogical space, especially due to Fabro’s deliberate omission of the question mark. Students, accustomed to being told how to make art, were instead exhorted to decide what to do and to reflect on why. This redistribution of responsibility from the curriculum to the student was both empowering and disorienting; it also required an autonomy that presumed students were already capable of exercising it. In Brera’s classrooms, as some students later reflected, this expectation exposed inequalities of self-confidence, preparation, and access to artistic frameworks. In this sense, autonomy was not simply granted but unevenly distributed and received. Fabro’s interventions were simultaneously liberating and destabilizing. His teaching redefined artistic learning as a process of self-definition, leaving the tools to navigate this challenge in the students’ hands [fig. 5].
fig. 5 Luciano Fabro teaching at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, November 1993. Photograph: Mario Gorni
Writing in 2018 in The Brooklyn Rail, artist Paolo Canevari, who also studied under Fabro and later became an art teacher, described the experience as transformative:
«I was a young artist and I asked myself: what artist could express such a profound group of concepts in such a simple, elegant and absolute way? I was particularly grateful to Fabro for transmitting to me a vision of the artist’s role in contemporary society […] and for his idea of transformation and the help that an artist can, and must, give to the younger ones».28
Canevari’s recollection situates Fabro’s teaching within an ethical framework. For Fabro, the artist’s role was not confined to aesthetic innovation but extended to cultural and moral responsibility. By recasting the artist as a figure of social transformation, Fabro replaced other academy professors’ emphasis on mastery of form with a less tangible expectation of ethical insight. For the most successful students, this approach became an impetus toward independent thinking.
Students such as Moro, Caravaggio, Rüdiger, and Arianna Giorgi (who attended the public lectures) all recalled their surprise that, from the start: «Fabro immediately spoke to us not as students, but as artists. He instantly put [us] on a higher level, already prompting us with many questions».29 This approach dissolved the hierarchy of the traditional atelier or bottega model by granting his pupils unusual dignity. The approach of teaching as a form of theoretical and conceptual questioning and the elevation of the student to fellow artist had been a standard attitude in experimental art pedagogy from the Bauhaus to the Subjects of the Artist School in Greenwich Village to CalArts. But Fabro derived his concept from an earlier humanistic source: the classical Socratic model of maieutica. As Caravaggio and others recalled, classes were devoted to critical and reflective discussions and dialogue around artworks made by students, works from art history that could relate to these student-produced artworks, and conversations about the current situation of art. Caravaggio described the lessons as «a philosophy of art that was concrete». This formulation points to a pedagogy grounded not in abstraction alone, but in the practical negotiation of meaning through dialogue. Caravaggio recalled that there were no traditional lessons by Fabro on manual labor or techniques of how to make things. These aspects were folded into discussions of students’ works.
As Moro noted, the elevation of students to artists came at a price: sudden exposure to the responsibilities of authorship. The questions it created were both intellectual and existential. Fabro’s classroom was neither protected nor directive. From a pedagogical standpoint, such an approach was intentional: a deliberate suspension of certainty designed to compel self-definition and intellectual maturity that the institutional framework did not provide or nurture. It also destabilized the traditional relationship between student and master, who dictated style and how to make art. This challenged Brera’s distinctions between theory and practice by demanding independent thinking and critical evaluation of artistic choices. Fabro’s own distinct way of working, in which he negated the idea of a single style or belonging to an artistic movement, provided an opening for young artists to move more freely. Moro, reflecting decades later, stated that Fabro constantly cultivated in his students «the habit of […] repeating the mantra “see everything”».30 This emphasis on perception functioned as both a practical and an ethical exercise, cultivating attentiveness as a moral disposition. The utopian tension of Fabro’s pedagogy lay in its insistence on extending perception beyond conventional limits.
Fabro attracted young artists because he was directly involved in the avant-garde art scene of his time. Some of his students traveled with him to help install his exhibitions, and he insisted they see all other shows in the area, and, whenever possible, exhibitions abroad. Rüdiger recalls Fabro’s stunned reaction when he learned his students had not seen a fundamental exhibition in Paris, prompting a group of students to visit it immediately. Yet despite this sense of collectivity, each student followed a different path. The imprint of Fabro’s training is visible in the shared ethos of commitment to perceptual inquiry, even if their practices diverged. Fabro’s classroom ultimately produced difference rather than consensus, which may be the truest testament to its success. «Fabro created around him a kind of community where you were expected to think and to look», Moro said. «It wasn’t about competing. It was about finding your own position». Caravaggio echoed this, recalling how Fabro advised him to «run his own race». Giorgi recalled that
«I think of Fabro as a teacher who brought back to the surface in me what had lain dormant. He made me believe in myself – not in my desire to express myself, still immature and adolescent, but in developing what I already felt, which was awakened through his persistent belief in art».31
Fabro’s view of lessons as verbal forms of shaping artistic practice is evident in his exhortation: «We must learn to talk about art again», as he told curator Martin Schwander. «In my lessons at Brera […] I am trying to start up a discussion on principles».32 To «talk about art again» meant recovering seriousness: discussion was active practice, not marginal commentary. As Caravaggio noted, students expecting clear instruction often found this disorienting, but it cultivated the ability to construct meaning through dialogue, sometimes heated, due to Fabro’s confident and argumentative approach. His pedagogy was liberating yet demanding; his strategic withdrawal of explicit direction required self-motivation and worked best for students capable of translating conceptual uncertainty into personal inquiry. To earn Fabro’s approval, students agreed, was deeply meaningful given their respect for him.
Canevari observed that Fabro’s teaching «does not accept institutional didactic systems». Indeed, his lectures differed from the official curriculum of the time in both Brera and across Italy, which continued to be based in three areas: painting, sculpture, and set design. This approach demonstrated that critique could operate within institutional frameworks without rejecting them outright. Rather than abolishing the academy’s structure, students were expected to negotiate their individual positions within it.
Fabro’s stance reflected respect for the past and taught students a form of pragmatic dissent: the institution could be a site of critical reflection rather than an adversary to be escaped, as it had been in the late-nineteenth century for artists such as Medardo Rosso, who transformed his expulsion from Brera into a battle cry and a badge of honor.33
This abandonment of studies at Brera became something of an avant-garde trope. More generally, criticizing, abandoning, or rejecting outright the value of academic studies as a badge of authenticity had already begun with early modernism in the late nineteenth century. Specifically in relation to Brera, Lucio Fontana finished his studies there in the late 1920s but then declared his disinterest in following the footsteps of his teacher, Adolfo Wildt, and his preferred material, marble. Likewise, in the postwar years, artists like Piero Manzoni only briefly attended the Scuola Libera del Nudo, but were deeply interested in the artists’ gatherings at the nearby Bar Jamaica. By turning the art academy into a space that tolerated uncertainty, learning depended on navigating between guidance and freedom. These stories were certainly long in circulation in the literature: Brera archivist Mino Borghi had published one of the few monographs on Rosso in 1950, containing a romanticized version of Rosso’s expulsion repeated in all the Italian literature, including Luciano Caramel’s 1979 exhibition at Milan’s Palazzo della Permanente. Guido Ballo, who taught at Brera for decades, had published his first monograph on Fontana in 1970, in which he discussed Fontana’s liberation from his master’s ideas.
Most of Fabro’s students who enrolled in the 1980s and 1990s recount that they did not know these stories at the time they enrolled. They did not feel the need to rebel against the institution per se and had few expectations about learning how to make things. Instead, they were more interested in Brera as a place capable of gathering different ideas about art. As Caravaggio recalled «you would go into one classroom and the professor would say something, and then you’d go into another classroom, and another professor would say the exact opposite. There was a certain pluralism with many contrasting voices».
The Fabro classroom at Brera became an experiment in maintaining this fragile balance. The Che fare that inaugurated his teaching was never a question to be answered but a condition to be inhabited. Students learned to negotiate between instruction and intuition, and between institutional expectation and artistic autonomy. The outcome was neither consensus nor stylistic conformity, but rather artists trained in reflective practice. Fabro extended this approach internationally, delivering lectures at art academies worldwide.34
By 2002, the teaching experiment ended due to Fabro’s growing frustration with students’ passivity and his sense of no longer being understood by a younger generation. In this case, unlike in the past when students abandoned Brera, it was the teacher who left the academy. His first students recalled that by then, Fabro perceived students’ desire to be told what to do as an affront to his deep, hard-won reverence for art and humanism. In fact, his last lecture, published posthumously, was a sad and disappointed lesson written to himself. This excerpt gives a sense of his bitterness:
«[…] while it is possible that the students were working at home, it is as if the trust between us were fading as the historical implications became more relevant and current. The tenth lecture was supposed to be on contemporary issues, but no one proposed either works or objections… In what reality did my students live and work?
I saw my words, my information, viewed with suspicion: spilling the beans on the customs and practices of the art world was to trivialize art in general. Wasn’t turning the mystery underlying art into suspicion a form of arrogance? […]
While I insisted on taming the mysteries of a past […] my students… and perhaps even a new breed of artists and art professionals… were positioning themselves in a manner detached from all the issues and expectations that had motivated me pedagogically. My students had nothing left to say to me, nor to make me say…
This tenth lecture was therefore a lesson I taught myself; it resulted in my abandonment of Brera».35
Yet his pedagogic legacy persists through the publication of his lectures and their emphasis on an ethos of attention to perception. This critique remains relevant amid the increasing appropriation of art education, which now includes pragmatic preparation for managing one’s career in an art world increasingly framed as a system of production, with artists positioned as cultural workers. He would likely not have appreciated that the art world itself has become an object of study, and that artistic practice is often treated as inseparable from strategic professional positioning within it. Indeed, alongside studio work, students today are trained in “professional practice” skills such as writing artist’s statements, applying for grants and residencies, and building portfolios for galleries and institutions. This reflects a broader understanding of the art world as a “creative economy” or ecosystem structured by networks of circulation involving galleries, museums, fairs, and funding bodies that, while certainly existing in Fabro’s time, would nonetheless have been distant from his pedagogical ethos.
As Howard Singerman has argued, for US institutions the training of artists is not simply a matter of acquiring skills or even managing a career, but of being formed as a particular kind of subject within an institutional and discursive framework.36
Today, the so-called “art world” emerges less as an external system to be navigated than as a field in which artists learn to be recognized by others. Within this context, visual artists who are teachers do not merely offer practical advice but model how to articulate a “practice,” how to position one’s work, and how to inhabit the role of the artist through language, presentation, and self-description. What is at stake is not only the circulation of artworks but the production of the artist as a legible and professional figure within the system. This relates to the perplexing question that art historian Howard Risatti already asked over 30 years ago: «[A]t the very heart of the problem of educating the artist lies the difficulty of what it means to be an artist today».37 By treating perception as an ethical task, Fabro’s approach shifted art education from rote skill toward cultivating awareness. His lesson was not how to make art but how to attend to the world and one’s position as an artist within it – a principle that continues to resonate in contemporary debates over the purpose of the art academy.
The Cantiere: A Practice of Relational Construction
Whereas TAM emphasized the experimental reinvention of manual and material knowledge as a form of collective learning, and the Brera lectures fostered perceptual and ethical attentiveness in the classroom, a third model reconfigures these concerns at the level of relational encounter itself. Remo Salvadori’s Cantiere proposed a structure of encounter: a deliberately ephemeral framework through which awareness, collaboration, and self-reflection could emerge. If TAM organized pedagogy through material infrastructure and the Brera lectures through discursive and ethical provocation, the Cantiere redefines it as a situational construction: a temporary configuration in which learning emerges through shared presence rather than instruction or critique. Learning here is not transmitted but arises through the reconfiguration of relations among participants, space, and time. “Interior scaffolding” becomes a distributed and temporary structure sustained through co-presence and shared attention. The term “cantiere” was also reconfigured in Italian pedagogical and architectural discourse, where the notion of cantiere aperto (open construction site) is used to describe learning as an unfinished, collective process, echoing post-Beuysian conceptions of art and education as ongoing social production.38 Salvadori’s recollection of his own artistic training at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in the late 1960s, in the wake of the pedagogical and institutional upheavals surrounding 1968, was not negative. He recalled having been a student of painter Afro Basaldella, whom he did not see often. Basaldella, however, did visit Salvadori’s studio and encouraged him to engage with the Turinese Arte Povera milieu, setting the young artist on a path that would deeply influence his thinking. Salvadori encountered complete freedom of approach in the academy and had no expectation that this schooling should satisfy his beliefs about art. His later idea to cultivate a multi-disciplinary experience led him to «seek more universal responses that were close to my desire for awareness and to discover a practice of intersubjectivity». His Cantiere was not intended to counter his own past artistic education. It was neither anti-academic, nor programmatic, nor ideologically driven, but rather the result of a series of favorable circumstances that presented themselves to him.
Salvadori had not taught in a structured way before the Cantiere experience, but he did participate in meetings with Brera students via the art critic and Brera professor of art history Jole De Sanna, as well as with students from the Accademia di Firenze through the professor of art history Laura Veceré. Both professors intuitively understood Salvadori’s pedagogical model during the 1990s, creating meetings “outdoors” (outside of the Academies) in the places that Remo proposed: De Sanna at the “Vivaio Riva” historic nursery in the vicinity of the Colonne di San Lorenzo and Veceré at the Convent of San Marco (and the Biblioteca di Michelozzo inside the convent). Written testimonies were published on both these occasions. Salvadori also conducted workshops for art students in numerous cities in Italy, Asia, Istanbul and the US at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, as well as meetings of different kinds in the context of exhibitions.39
The first collective experiment he initiated, titled Cantiere (literally “worksite” or “construction site”), took shape in 2003 at Palazzo Chigi in San Quirico d’Orcia, Siena, at the invitation of Tuscany’s Councilor for Culture, Mariella Zoppi. Revived in later iterations – at the Brera Academy’s summer program on the Isola Comacina in 2010, and at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia between 2012 and 2014 in collaboration with Dynamo Camp for children with serious or chronic illnesses – each Cantiere assumed a distinct form while preserving the same underlying principle: the creation of what Salvadori called «a moment of relational intensity».40
The term cantiere, derived from the Latin cantherius (“trestle” or “support beam”), traditionally referred to the temporary scaffolding that sustained a building process. Once the structure stood, the scaffold was dismantled, leaving only its imprint in the finished edifice. This notion of a formative but temporary support provided an apt metaphor for an educational space whose purpose was to generate inner architectures of connection rather than physical ones. While the historic cantiere culminated in an aedificium – a completed building – the contemporary Cantiere displaced object-making with the construction of relations. Its aedificium was the capacity to dwell with others and with oneself: to feel “at home” in presence and awareness. As in the bottega, learning occurred through doing, but here “doing” meant attention, listening, and reciprocity. Scaffolding here no longer appears as an external support to be removed, but as an immanent condition of collective practice. The “interior” dimension of scaffolding becomes legible not as individual internalization, but as a disseminated field of relations sustained across participants.
The first Cantiere spanned five months, three behind closed doors and two open to the public. A collaboratively written calendar structured its rhythm: communal bread baking, shared meals, and concerts alternated with discussions and exercises. Participants noted the absence of hierarchy. Salvadori remarked that «there was no linear thinking or functional systematization. There was the setting of lines of work that each person formed in his or her own way».41
The Cantiere came into being organically, conceived as a form of “offering” rather than instruction. Its ethical framework was codified in a collectively written Charter emphasizing self-observation and relational awareness. It began with Aristotle’s statement in the Nicomachean Ethics – «For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them»42 – and expanded it with Pavel Florenskij’s reflection that every work «not enlightened and blessed by the authenticity of personal relationships seems utterly useless» [fig. 6].43 These principles grounded the Cantiere in experiential knowledge recast as a collective ethic.
Salvadori explained his choice of the word “cantiere” in a dedicated publication:
«The Cantiere is a meeting place for reflection and practice. The Cantiere presents to the outside world only the fruits of its labor. It does not produce cultural events. Its primary objective is not to formulate and present a seasonal program of events. The Cantiere’s work is first and foremost for the Cantiere itself, for its own growth. Among the fruits of the Cantiere are also its forms. The Cantiere is an institutional experiment dedicated to seeking forms of commissioning and public presentation that are appropriate to artistic work. Therefore, it cannot take for granted the established forms of relationship between the artist, the public, and institutions…»44
fig. 6 During “Il Cantiere. Remo Salvadori”, Palazzo Chigi, San Quirico d’Orcia, 2003
Courtesy Archivio Remo Salvadori
In its first iteration, the project’s central gesture materialized in a circular table traced by Salvadori on the floor, constructed from five types of wood, each corresponding to a day of the week and associated planetary symbolism dear to Salvadori: cherry (Monday/Moon), oak (Tuesday/Mars), birch (Friday/Venus), cypress (Saturday/Saturn), and ash (Sunday/Sun). Supported by five copper “circumstance” columns, the table became both a gathering point and a symbol of mutual support. Its center was an empty space that could not be filled, a void that signified openness, questioning, and non-appropriation [fig. 7].
fig. 7 Photomontage of the participants around Quando lo spazio si appiattisce il volume è nei nomi, 2003, in Il Cantiere, Remo Salvadori, Palazzo Chigi, San Quirico d’Orcia, 2003
Courtesy Archivio Remo Salvadori
Participation was fluid. Some joined through open calls, while others arrived by invitation or chance. As opposed to Pomodoro’s TAM and Fabro’s academy lectures, Salvadori’s Cantiere opened itself to a vast assortment of different professionals. It brought together artists, poets, historians, physicists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, and students – individuals described by Salvadori as artists in the broadest sense. Names were drawn in a circle that continually widened to include others who joined over time. Venture capitalist Roberto Lombardi, who financially supported aspects of the initiative and participated in it, was affectionately said to have «his hands in the dough of the world».45 Within this circle, Salvadori’s guiding questions were simple yet generative: «But what can you do?» and «What is your need?»
The first Cantiere included six tutors and twenty-seven students. Physicist and poet Gianluca Poldi recalled «what an act of esteem and trust […] to launch this enterprise with young people in their early twenties».46 Photographer Agostino Osio spoke of «the moral commitment of a generation […] an encounter between generations, in which one offered the other an extraordinary essence and vice versa».47 Architect Francesco Tiribelli described the process as «a centripetal and a centrifugal force; during its construction it was centripetal (leading to the center)… then came a hyper-dense moment of gathering […] and next a force of explosion that took people out into the world».48 From these encounters emerged long-term collaborations, friendships, and even marriages – forms of continuity that extended the Cantiere’s social architecture far beyond its temporal frame.
The worksites also generated tools of reflection. In San Quirico, Salvadori constructed twenty-seven copper tripods, each matching the participant’s eye-level, that made up an artwork titled L’osservatore non l’oggetto osservato, 1985 [2003] (The observer not the object observed). These instruments embodied «self-observation and intentionality»49 cultivating what the artist described as «non-mechanicality, being aware, being in the moment».50 Poldi characterized the environment as «a place of welcoming and learning to ask/to ask oneself […] understood as observation, listening, and openness for an art of encounter». «Everyone felt part of something,» Salvadori remembered, «everyone made a valuable individual contribution». Tiribelli recalled «a great embrace […] incredibly inclusive, generative, and open, a defined structure but always open to listening to people, to wayfarers». The Cantiere also absorbed the surrounding landscape: the Horti Leonini, thermal baths, and night walks under the stars. As Osio noted, «place knows how to welcome memories».
Although the Cantiere was temporary, it did not vanish like its historical counterpart. Its effects persisted as an internal support structure within participants’ lives. Tiribelli insisted, «I refuse to historicize the Cantiere; it is still open, current and alive in my mind, a living heritage in my practice today» [fig. 8].
fig. 8 Remo Salvadori with the grant recipients during Il Cantiere. Remo Salvadori, Palazzo Chigi, San Quirico d’Orcia, 2003
Courtesy Archivio Remo Salvadori
This vitality found further expression in three dense publications documenting each Cantiere, which served not as closure but as transmission. Osio observed that «perhaps we are only beginning to understand it today». Late arrivals spoke of its transformative potential. Graphic designer Serena Brovelli recalled it as «a new and powerful experience […] an inner freedom which brought out parts of me that I did not know […] moments of great liberation – a horizon, which opened new doors». Osio echoed, «we shook in that freedom».51 Designer Cristina Dell’Edera, who later compiled the documentation, called it a «living book», continuing to «keep the experience alive even after it had ended».52
Viewed within an international lineage of experimental education, one could say that the Cantiere shares affinities with the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, as noted by Salvadori himself, yet it reversed their premises. The Bauhaus sought to unite the arts in a Gesamtkunstwerk, where «men become builders by building».53 Black Mountain College extended this vision to a liberal-arts collective governed by non-hierarchical collaboration. In the way it was structured, the Cantiere had no Bauhaus-type Vorkurs, workshops, theoretical instruction, or applied building design. Unlike Black Mountain College, it had no faculty or areas of study or even a pretense to last over time. Instead, it constructed interior but lasting architectures of relations. It also offers a counterpoint to a contemporary educational landscape increasingly defined by professionalization and market logic, offering instead a generous practice of presence and encounter. Salvadori recalls that he was aware of these important pedagogical precedents, but his experience and his ideas for the Cantiere were rooted in his own historical culture of great paintings and architecture, along with his deep respect for US culture. He believes his ideas were reinforced by a closeness to the models presented by the Rudolf Steiner school, where his wife taught and his daughters studied. Participants understood the Cantiere not as a retreat from art but as a redefinition of its pedagogical function. They saw it as a space where one learned to listen to others as well as to oneself and to place, echoing Paul Celan’s notion of poetry as openness to the «mystery of encounter».54 Its ethos privileged availability over mastery.
The Cantiere’s emphasis on the act of holding recurs in the word “gift,” another word repeated by Salvadori and by those who participated. Indeed, “gift”’s Indo-European root ghebh- probably means “to hold”.55 The Cantiere thus became a container for collaboration, maintaining multiplicity but without imposing a center. Its emblem, the wooden table with an unoccupied middle, embodied this philosophy: a form that gathers yet leaves space unfilled. «That space», Salvadori said, «questions me […] and it’s best to keep it that way».56 Salvadori’s Cantiere presents a compelling model of pedagogical experimentation, emphasizing relational engagement as well as ethical attentiveness and experiential learning over object production or formal assessment. Its deliberate ephemerality and lack of conventional outcomes challenge traditional notions of evaluation and professional recognition as well as lastingness. It leaves open the question of how such practices might be integrated within broader educational and professional frameworks today.
Conclusion
The three pedagogical experiments examined here – TAM, the Brera lectures, and the Cantieri – each concluded in ways that were physically definitive. TAM ceased operations, the Brera lectures ended, and the Cantieri were intentionally dissolved after each iteration. These endings, however, were not simple closures. Rather, they signal the tension between ephemeral structures of instruction and the lasting effects of the pedagogical intentions underlying them. What persisted were the methods and questions, as well as the relational practices cultivated within them. Each case produces a different mode of persistence: TAM through material and institutional continuity, the Brera lectures through ethical and perceptual formation, and the Cantiere through relational and temporal intensities. Taken together, these cases suggest that pedagogy should not be understood as a bounded institutional practice, but as a dispersed condition that continues to operate across professional, social, and physical environments. In all three cases, “interior scaffolding” appears in material, conceptual, and relational forms, each describing modes of support that persist beyond formal instruction.
The legacies of these experiments survive in multiple forms. The Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro maintains a material and archival continuity of TAM, while Fabro’s published lectures continue to circulate his ideas beyond the Brera classrooms. Salvadori’s three books on the Cantieri record the structures and gestures of relational practice, and the Cantieri’s iterations may well be re-instated in new forms in the future. These repositories, while significant, remain incomplete without the voices of the lived, entangled experiences of participants. The impact of such pedagogical experiments is most evident in the ways that former students, collaborators, and attendees continue to produce art and transmit knowledge, generating new spaces of reflection and encounter in their own professional paths. These diffuse practices are difficult to trace precisely, although they all seem to reflect kinds of pedagogy that value ongoing process over outcomes.
Critical reflection on these legacies raises questions for future thinking in art education. The disappearance of the original structures reminds us that pedagogical innovation is often contingent and fragile. It is subject to institutional pressures and support, and vulnerable to generational shifts. At the same time, the enduring effects of these experiments suggest that transformative education operates less through permanence than through the capacity to instill sustained modes of attention and awareness.
Yet in the absence of formal structures, how can such lessons be maintained and transmitted? How can they be critically interrogated? These experiments suggest that pedagogical logics do not remain confined to art education, but extend into other domains where learning, labor, and sociality intersect. Rather than separating education from production and social life, they point to forms of collective organization that operate through temporary assemblies, informal infrastructures, and shared awareness. In this sense, the question is not only how pedagogy survives within institutions, but how it continues to surface in practices of work, collaboration, and cultural production beyond them. What remains, then, is not a stable framework of support, but the possibility of support as something continually reassembled across shifting conditions of practice.
Notes
I am grateful to the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, especially Massimo Sassi, Laura Berra, Federico Giani, and Ilaria Sgravatto, to Silvia Fabro who directs the Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro, as well as all the past students of each artist who generously granted me interviews for this essay. Thank you to Judith Hecker and Melissa Larner for critical reading and editorial input. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are by the author.
The author is also grateful to Remo and Sally Salvadori and the Archivio Remo Salvadori and wishes to acknowledge the recent passing of Remo Salvadori. With characteristic generosity, Salvadori continued to engage with this essay, responding to my questions and contributing to its development until the final days of his life. His absence will be deeply felt.
1. I adopt this concept from the pedagogical ideas first proposed by Lev Vygotsky in Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978. Originally published 1930-1934. Vygotsky’s concept was taken up using the notion of “scaffolding” in David Wood, Jerome Bruner, and Gail Ross, “The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving”, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, a. 17, n. 2, April 1976, pp. 89-100. Although perhaps not known by the artists discussed in this essay, Vygotsky’s ideas on pedagogy had been circulating in Italian translation since 1966.
2. Giorgio Zanchetti, “Prefazione”, in Sharon Hecker, Remo Bianco, la plastica e il trauma dell’artista italiano del dopoguerra, Electa, Milano, 2025, pp. 7-9.
3. I am aware that selecting three case studies associated with male artists risks reinforcing entrenched hierarchies of authorship and authority. Despite a feminist turn in Italy in the early 1970s, university-level education remained male-dominated, and the master-apprentice tradition continued to persist in Italian art academies. Even today the word maestro carries connotations of mastery and authority largely absent from maestra. Women professors at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan were rare, perhaps less concerned with conceptual questions about artistic education beyond their roles as artist-teachers.
4. Scuola d’arte del Montefeltro, Opere dei giovani artisti allievi del Centro TAM, 1991-1999, Lupetti Editori, Milano, 1999.
5. Guido Ballo, Arnaldo Pomodoro. Terre e metalli (exhibition catalogue, Torino, Galleria d’Arte Il Prisma, 16-30 November 1957), s.e., s.l., 1957, p. 31.
6. Gillo Dorfles, “A. e G. Pomodoro; creazioni plastiche”, La Biennale di Venezia. Rivista trimestrale di arte cinema musica teatro moda, n. 34, January-March 1959, pp. 21-27.
7. See Archivio Arnaldo Pomodoro (hereafter AAP), Carte di lavoro, Testi e dichiarazioni o interviste.
8. For an extended essay dedicated to this theme, see Sharon Hecker, “Arnaldo Pomodoro e la memoria materiale dell’arte”, in Luca Bochicchio (ed.), Arnaldo Pomodoro DE-RIVE, ABC-Arte/Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Genova/Milano 2025, pp. 18-26.
9. Giulia Zompa, “Esercizi”, in Elisabetta Modena and Marco Scotti (eds.), L’opera che non c’è. Arte e progetti non realizzati tra XX e XXI secolo, PostmediaBooks, Milano, 2025, pp. 82-86. See also Federico Giani, La negazione della forma: Arnaldo Pomodoro tra minimalismo e controcultura (exhibition catalogue, Milano, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, 12 March 2023 – 19 May 2024), s.e., s.l., 2023.
10. Sharon Hecker, interview with Dwight Baker, 2025.
11. Giovanni Gentiletti, in Scuola d’arte del Montefeltro, 1999, p. 13.
12. Monetti recalls more women than men, but it is not possible to determine whether this gender breakdown was unusual or not for the academies of the time.
13. Sharon Hecker, interview with Chiara Monetti, 2025.
14. Arnaldo Pomodoro, “Alcune considerazioni sull’arte del gioiello,” in Scuola d’arte del Montefeltro, 1999, p. 14.
15. Ivi, p. 13.
16. Walter Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program”, 1919. See <https://adepratt.weebly.com/uploads/3/7/7/1/37716215/bauhaus_-_manifesto__program_statement.pdf> (04/26).
17. See Howard Singerman, Art Subjects. Making Artists in the American University, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999, p. 36, and see index for numerous other mentions. I thank Raffaele Bedarida for recommending this book.
18. Ivi, p. 14.
19. Ibidem.
20. Eleonora Fiorani, “Sui materiali”, Opere dei giovani artisti allievi del Centro TAM, 1999, p. 11.
21. Sharon Hecker, interview with Paola Boccaletti, Responsabile Dipartimento Educativo, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, 2025.
22. AAP, Carte di lavoro, Testi e dichiarazioni o interviste.
23. Luciano Fabro, Regole d’arte, Per l’arte 3, Casa degli Artisti, Milano, 1980; Arte torna arte. Lezioni e conferenze 1981-1997, Einaudi, Torino, 1999; Silvia Fabro (ed.), Lezioni 1983-1995. Luciano Fabro, Scheiwiller, Milano, 2022; Silvia Fabro (ed.), Lezioni 1996-2002. Luciano Fabro, Scheiwiller, Milano, 2023. To date, there has been no critical analysis of Fabro’s lectures.
24. For the same reason, Fabro revived the Casa degli Artisti in Milan together with artist Hidetoshi Nagasawa and critic Jole De Sanna in 1978. This was a collective, artist-run, space for encounter and discussion among artists of different generations, as well as a platform for exhibitions, debates, and collaborations, especially in support of young artists.
25. Luciano Fabro, Aufhänger, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 1983. This book is a translation of Fabro’s Attaccapanni (Einaudi, Torino, 1978) and includes a collection of his other writing: Regole d’arte 1980; Vademecum, a pamphlet distributed during his exhibition at the Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1981; as well as the first publication of Lettere ai germani, 1979.
26. Arianna Rosica, “Italia 90, Intervista a Liliana Moro”, Artribune, 31 December 2018; Sharon Hecker, interviews with Bernhard Rüdiger, Gianni Caravaggio, and Arianna Giorgi, 2025. See also Stefano Chiodi’s interview with Liliana Moro in this journal: https://www.senzacornice.org/portfolio-articoli/chiodi-moro/.
27. Fabro, Arte torna arte, 1999, p. XXII.
28. Paolo Canevari, “Luciano Fabro”, in Sharon Hecker (ed.), “Why Luciano Fabro Today?”, The Brooklyn Rail, September 2018.
29. Rosica, “Italia 90”, 2018, as well as author’s interviews with artists who were Fabro’s students as discussed in this essay.
30. Ibidem.
31. Giorgi, 2025.
32. “Luciano Fabro with Martin Schwander”, in Hecker, “Why Luciano Fabro Today?”, 2018.
33. See Sharon Hecker, A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, University of California Press, Oakland, 2017, pp. 21-45, as well as Sharon Hecker, “Ambivalent bodies; Medardo Rosso’s Brera Petition”, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 142, n. 1173, December 2000, pp. 773-777.
34. Fabro gave numerous lectures and conducted workshops for art students across Europe, the United States, and Japan. These are too numerous to list here and are currently being compiled for publication by the Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro. A notable example is the lecture I Would Like to Leave a Message for the Americans, delivered by Fabro at the San Francisco Art Institute on October 2, 1992, in which I participated as a simultaneous translator for the artist. I recall that the audience was highly engaged, and Fabro’s lecture was followed by an extended thirty-minute question-and-answer session, in which he tried to respond to questions which often derived from a US-centered artistic viewpoint.
35. Luciano Fabro, “Decima lezione. Questa lezione a me medesimo,” 1 March 2007, in Silvia Fabro (ed.), Lezioni 1996-2002, Libri Scheiwiller, Milano 2023, pp. 270-271.
36. Singerman, Art Subjects, 1999.
37. Howard Risatti, “Protesting Professionalism”, New Art Examiner, n. 6, February 1991, p. 23.
38. Although there may be echoes of the idea of the artist as laborer, worker, or aligned with workers in the word cantiere, the meaning here is quite different from the way Caroline Jones reframes the postwar (especially 1960s) American artist not as an isolated genius, but as a worker embedded in systems of industrial, corporate, and managerial labor. See Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996. The same goes for Armando Pizzinato’s 1948 work, Cantieri, understood as a postwar image of physical labor, reconstruction, and collective identity in Italy after World War II.
39. These are too numerous to list here and are currently being compiled for publication by the Archivio Remo Salvadori.
40. Remo Salvadori in conversation with Sharon Hecker, 2023-2024. On this topic see, Sharon Hecker, “I cantieri per l’arte di Remo Salvadori: momenti di intensità relazionale,” in Antonella Soldaini (ed.), Remo Salvadori, Skira Arte, Milan, 2025, pp. 60-67.
41. Ibidem.
42. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, <https://dn790003.ca.archive.org/0/items/AristotlesNicomacheanEthics/Aristotles%20-%20Nicomachean%20Ethics.pdf>, p. 20 (04/26).
43. Il pensiero polifonico di Pavel Florenskij. Una risposta alle sfide del presente, 2nd ed., edited by Silvano Tagliagambe, Massimiliano Spano, Andrea Oppo, PFTS University Press, Cagliari, 2018, p. 287.
44. The “white book” originated as a foundational statement of intent, co-written with collaborators who later became tutors at the Cantiere. It was read publicly at the project’s inauguration in the Horti Leonini gardens before students and commissioning authorities, and was accompanied by Moleskine notebooks given to students as journals. It remained an internal document and was never formally published. I thank the Archivio Remo Salvadori for sharing this information with me.
45. Roberto Lombardi in conversation with Remo Salvadori and Sharon Hecker, 2023.
46. Gianluca Poldi in conversation with Remo Salvadori and Sharon Hecker, 2023.
47. Agostino Osio in conversation with Remo Salvadori and Sharon Hecker, 2023.
48. Francesco Tiribelli in conversation with Remo Salvadori and Sharon Hecker, 2023.
49. See Remo Salvadori in Chiara Bertola (ed.), L’osservatore non l’oggetto osservato (exhibition catalogue, Venice, Querini Stampalia, 8 March – 8 May 2005), Charta, Milano, 2005.
50. Salvadori, 2023-2024.
51. For previous quotes, see: Poldi, 2023; Osio, 2023; Tiribelli, 2023.
52. Cristina Dell’Edera in conversation with Remo Salvadori and Sharon Hecker, 2023.
53. Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program”, 1919.
54. Paul Celan, Selections, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 2005, p. 164.
55. The word “gift” comes from *ghabh- and *ghebh-, of the Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to give or receive.” The basic sense of the root is probably “to hold,” which can be either in offering or in taking. See <https://www.etymonline.com/word/*ghabh-> (04/26).
56. Salvadori, 2023-2024.
