Art in a Place of Work and "smart power"
An Italian perspective
Italy is a useful place to think about “smart power” since it has spent almost a century rehearsing, and putting into action, something that much of Europe is only now trying to describe, as we wrote a couple of months ago. Long before “creative ecosystems” became policy language, and long before anyone started talking about “creative R&D,” Italian businesses were already treating art and design as part of their strategic identity - not a decorative afterthought.
That distinction matters. If art is merely a surface treatment, you can bolt it on at the end of a project, hang it in a lobby, hand out the chilled prosecco, and call it a day. It’ll make some people happier, and fulfil the expectations of a narrow definition of what art is. Fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
If art is part of the identity of an organisation, it sits closer to the decisions that shape how people think, how products are imagined, how teams work together, and how a company understands its role. That is where smart power lives: not in slogans, not in branding campaigns, but in the deeper cultural machinery that determines what a company believes it can, and ought to do.
Italy, or the region that we know as Italy today, has a rich history of deep relationships between business and the arts, going back centuries. That is rather beyond the scope of this article, but of course that heritage is very much at the root of why the Italian attitude to the importance of art and design exists in the first place.
For us, building Art in a Place of Work, Italy offers something more valuable than “inspiration.” Let’s concentrate on a timeline that modern business can recognise, with stress points and challenges it knows all too well.
Consider Olivetti, the canonical case: a company that did not simply employ designers, but deliberately fused technical and humanistic culture into a single strategic approach. In 1937, it integrated a graphic design department into its corporate structure, a move that now reads like an early recognition that meaning is not an accessory to function, but part of it.
Under Adriano Olivetti, son of the company’s founder Camillo, the town of Ivrea became a kind of conceptual and practical laboratory for the idea that companies are not only economic engines, but cultural actors: places where architecture, communication, industrial design, and civic imagination can be shaped together. Adriano, a self-taught urban planner, applied his thinking to creating not just some of the leading tech products of the day, but to building a company town.
The names associated with Olivetti have become legendary: designers, architects, writers, and artists brought into the orbit of an organisation that understood creative intelligence as structural, not ornamental. One can argue about whether it was the “Apple of the 1970s” or something else entirely, but the deeper point is this: Olivetti made creativity operational. It embedded it, and organised for it.
For Art in a Place of Work, this matters because it gives us a European origin story for the proposition that artists and designers can be strategic partners in innovation and identity. Not as “content” - ooph, I hate that word - or as a glossy veneer. Not as a nice-to-have but as co-thinkers. Plus, it gives us something else as well: a precedent for the kind of bridge-building we see as central to our work.
This is where Italy’s second great example of art & business collaboration comes in: Bonotto, the textile company in Molvena that, in the 1970s, invited artists associated with the Fluxus movement into the life of a working factory, as a literal example of artistic practice entangled with production, materials, and the daily life of employees.
Established to manage this legacy, the company Foundation protects the collection and supports research into Fluxus, Visual, and Sound Poetry, fostering the connection between entrepreneurship and artistic creation.
Bonotto continues this approach with its Editions and Collaborations - working with artists to create tapestries, including using recycled plastic yarns to produce sustainable luxury, as seen in the residency at Mattatoio di Roma.
Bonotto Editions, launched in 2014, is a program that creates special artistic installations, such as those by Italo Rota or the 25-piece furniture collection by Matteo Cibic unveiled at Milan’s Salone del Mobile.
The factory continues to serve as a “contemporary Renaissance workshop” where artists, such as those working with the Fondation, engage in continuous experimentation.
The Bonotto story is so rich that it is now often described as a sustained model of integration, through a living industrial context, instead of mere “patronage.” What makes Bonotto particularly relevant to contemporary smart power thinking is that the model does not treat the workplace as somewhere to be “improved by art”, but as a living culture in which creative behaviour can be learned and transmitted. That is exactly why Italian commentary frames the in-company residency as an innovation practice: artists working alongside employees introduce “devianza creativa,” a deviation from routine that changes patterns of behaviour and opens new ways of thinking.
That is the point where many corporate art initiatives fail, having confused aesthetic uplift with reshaping of culture. They commission something beautiful, and then wonder why nothing in the organisation feels different afterwards. But, you see, creativity is a practice, not a mood. It requires a set of conditions to allow it to flourish: time, permission, wide-ranging curiosity, and - importantly - a sense that exploration is not a threat. And it contains an inherent dichotomy. Making art is about completing pieces - paintings, chapters in a book, songs - but the making is often, if not usually, more important than the pieces themselves - to the point where Sting, a prolific songwriter if there ever was one, once described his output as “it’s all one song.”
Our work as facilitators and curators is to understand that process and to build those conditions deliberately. That sounds simple, but it is not. It involves designing encounters that are safe enough for people to participate in openly, but challenging enough to nudge them beyond the familiar. It means selecting artists who can work with real constraints, without losing their integrity or their capacity to provoke new thinking. It is also a process of translating between languages: the language of commercial responsibility and the language of artistic experiment, so that neither side feels patronised or misunderstood, but rather enriched by those encounters. In other words, we build bridges that hold that weight, allow for the cargo to cross, and remain standing long after our caravan has passed.
Italy’s contemporary examples show how varied those bridges can be. At Kilometro Rosso, a science and technology park near Bergamo, the “Artist-in-Residence” programme embeds young artists inside advanced research centres, explicitly aiming to create conditions for integration between artistic practice and scientific-technological research.
This is not “art for the walls” but a structured attempt to create cross-learning between disciplines, treating the residency as a form of non-conventional training for both sides. Once an experiment, now an established key hub for technology transfer and collaboration in Europe, Kilometro Rosso is considered highly successful as it hosts around 80 companies and research centres, facilitating many R&D projects and generating significant innovation in various technological fields.
In Sicily, agricultural and hospitality businesses offer another route: residencies embedded in working landscapes and production realities.
Mandranova, an olive farm, runs an Artist in Residence programme framed as an exchange between artists and territory. The winery Tenuta Rasocolmo explicitly describes its estate becoming “a large art atelier,” transforming parts of the residence into studios for making sculpture and site-specific installations. These projects are smaller in scale than Kilometro Rosso, but they carry the same core idea: art as sustained inquiry into place, identity, and long-term meaning, rather than a one-off gesture.
Then there are examples where a company’s own technology becomes artistic medium. In 2024, the Durst Group, known for high-end digital printing systems (and prior to that for some of the World’s best photographic enlargers - I have fond memories of those), engaged South Tyrolean artist Klaus Pobitzer for an “Inside-Out” project that scales portraits and imagery across architectural surfaces, using the company’s own capabilities. The symbolic message is straightforward and powerful: the medium is the company’s expertise; the result is both an artwork and a statement about who the organisation is, and who it is for.
And then there is the ecosystem approach: ex-industrial sites reinvented as cultural and innovation districts. In Florence, Manifattura Tabacchi - once a tobacco factory, as the name would suggest - hosts NAM (Not A Museum) and residency programmes such as SUPERBLAST, drawing artistic research into the fabric of a redeveloped industrial space. Even when the factory is no longer operating as it once did, the principle remains: art can anchor new forms of public life and new kinds of economic and cultural relationship.
There are more, of course. Mutina - a manufacturer of some seriously beautiful tiles - offers a different but equally instructive model. Its “Mutina for Art” programme is curated and structured explicitly as a source of dialogue and exchange between contemporary art and a design-driven business. The company’s exhibitions and projects are put together by Sarah Cosulich, whose long curatorial pedigree includes running the Pinacoteca Agnelli. (Oh, wait, there’s another Italian industrialist contributing to broader culture…) The initiative frames art not as “sponsorship” but as an ongoing conversation that influences how a company understands itself and how it participates in contemporary culture.
Another institution, at the flagship end, is Pirelli HangarBicocca: a vast contemporary art space in Milan that operates with free public entry and is funded by Pirelli at around €5 million per year, according to a profile of the institution and its leadership. This is closer to cultural infrastructure than residency practice, but it reinforces a crucial theme: industrial groups can treat art as a strategic footprint - part of how they exist in a city, part of their civic identity, part of the democratic accessibility of culture. One might be forgiven for thinking that company about as afar removed from art as a tyre manufacturer would not be interested in building a temple to culture. One would be wrong.
Put these strands together, and you begin to see why Italy is such a useful laboratory for the shift from soft power to smart power.
Soft power, in its simplest form, is magnetic attraction: a country or a city becomes appealing through culture, reputation, and narrative. This happens when all that cultural intelligence is not only projected outward, but put to work inside lager outside systems: organisations, regional development, education, inside the ways people learn to collaborate and invent. Culture is a many-headed beast. As such, it has potential to grow in many distinct directions - all at once, independently, as much as in concert.
Italy’s examples demonstrate something we often need to say plainly: bridging art and business is not fringe activity. It is neither eccentric, nor new. It is a recognisable European practice that has been evolving for a very long time, increasingly discussed in language that aligns with contemporary policy frameworks around ecosystems, innovation, skills, and territorial development.
That brings us back to what we bring to the table. Art in a Place of Work is not a programme that “installs art” in companies. It is a family of curated, facilitated processes designed to helps organisations learn how to think with artists, from artists, and - importantly - around artists. That distinction is the difference between a one-time event and building a capability. Yes, gallery launches are great, but month-long residencies, and development programmes that last half a year, are far more impactful.
As facilitators, we design the human conditions for experimentation: the pacing, the social permission, the rituals of attention, the ways teams can work together without defaulting to hierarchy or defensiveness. As curators, we select artists for both, the quality of their work, and their ability to operate ethically and intelligently inside real organisational environments. Finally, as artists ourselves, we understand the internal discipline of creative practice: the patience, the resistance to premature conclusions, the ability to stay with ambiguity long enough for something new to emerge.
We can show how creative practice strengthens strategic imagination, organisational learning, and the lived culture of work, without collapsing art into a crude “tool.”
Italy helps us argue for this with confidence. It gives us historic depth, long-term operational precedent, contemporary R&D integration, human-centred organisational storytelling through technology, territorial and landscape-based inquiry, and an ecosystem and infrastructure perspective.
Taken together, these examples allow us to frame AiPoW in Lublin not as a local curiosity, but as a Polish contribution to a wider European movement: a movement in which companies treat artists not as decorators, but as partners in strategic imagination, organisational learning, and regional smart power.
In the end, that is what “bridge thinking” really means - not a polite handshake between two separate worlds, but building a shared structure that both sides can stand on - strong enough to carry the weight of commerce, and open enough to allow for the freedom and tolerance to risk that creativity requires.
Notes:
Ivrea is listed as a UNESCO heritage site, with the citation that it “represents one of the first and highest expressions of a modern vision in relation to production, architectural design and social aspects at a global scale in relation to the history of industrial construction, and the transition from mechanical to digitalised industrial technologies.”
Fluxus was an avant-garde art movement that emerged in the 1960s, characterised by a collective of artists, composers, and designers who sought to blur the boundaries between art and everyday life through experimental performances and the use of everyday materials. It emphasised collaboration, humor, and a rejection of traditional artistic norms, promoting the idea that art should be accessible to everyone.
https://observer.com/2025/12/arts-luigi-bonotto-fondazione-bonotto-fluxus-legacy/
https://mandranova.com/en/artist-in-residence/
https://www.tenutarasocolmo.com/residenza-di-artista
https://www.durst-group.com/en/Stories/durst-group-launches-art-project-inside-out-with-renowned-south-tyrolean-artist-klaus-pobitzer
https://pirellihangarbicocca.org/en/
Thank you to my friend Filiberto Amati for his approfondimenti speciali italiani.