Michelangelo Pistoletto’s artwork returns for ECOC opening

The opening ceremony of the European Capital of Culture will feature a recreation of a 1966 performance by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto in which a ball of newspapers will roll from Italy's Gorizia to Nova Gorica. The Newspaper Sphere will contain newspaper articles about landmark events from the history of the Goriška region, CE Report quotes STA.

The ball of newspapers, which has travelled around the world since the 1960s, will this time feature articles from the Slovenian newspaper Primorski Dnevnik and the Trieste-based Il Piccolo on the Paris Peace Treaty, the Treaty of Osimo, and the ten-day Slovenian independence war.

Also highlighted will be articles on Slovenia's EU accession, the Schengen Agreement, the announcement that Gorizia and Nova Gorica will hold the European Capital of Culture title, and on the visit by Slovenian and Italian presidents Borut Pahor and Sergio Mattarella in 2021.

The Newspaper Sphere will also feature a copy of the first issue of Primorski Dnevnik, which was issued on May 1945 in Trieste.

The sphere will start its journey in Gorizia's main square, where some 300 young members of local sports associations and some top athletes will roll it through the streets all the way to the border with Slovenia, where Slovenian youth will take over, carrying it to the site of the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) opening ceremony, the square before the town hall, where it is to be illuminated as a torch of peace.

According to Italian media, the idea to make the sphere part of the ECOC came to Pistoletto when he was preparing an exhibition in Friuli a year ago. "It's an incredible moment: the fact that two cities can become a symbol of a common culture seems to me like a kind of cultural parliament that can unite people on the street with the Newspaper Sphere," Pistoletto was quoted as saying by portal imagazine.

After the ECOC opening, the sphere by the famous Italian artist, to whom a major exhibition was dedicated at the Cukrarna arts centre in Ljubljana in 2022, is expected to return to Gorizia, where it will be displayed in a prominent public place as a testimony to the art at the opening of the ECOC.