The Third Paradise

A living art installation created by world-renowned Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto now adorns the curving green roof of the NTU Art, Design and Media building. The Third Paradise comprises three large connecting circles spanning 41 meters at its longest length.

Pistoletto's The Third Paradise conceptual artwork uses a symbol he created that plays on the mathematical infinity sign, with two smaller circles on opposing ends representing nature’s paradise and an artificial paradise. For the first living installation in Asia of his Third Paradise, he used the Red Sessile Joyweed plant, an edible local shrub that is also made into herbal tea.

Pistoletto is renowned for his Mirror Paintings – artworks made of human-sized mirrors that have been displayed in major galleries and museums across Europe and the United States since the 1960s.

The Rebirth/Third Paradise is the fusion between the first and second paradise:

The first is the paradise in which humans were fully integrated into nature.

The second is the artificial paradise, developed by human intelligence to globalising proportions through science and technology. This paradise is made of artificial needs, artificial products, artificial comforts, artificial pleasures, and every other form of artifice.

Humankind has created a truly artificial world which has triggered, in an exponential manner and in parallel with beneficial effects, irreversible processes of decline and consumption of the natural world. The Third Paradise is the third phase of humanity, realise as a balanced connection between artifice and nature.

The Third Paradise is the passage to a new level of planetary civilisations, essential to ensure the survival of the human race. To this purpose we first of all need to re-form the principles and the ethical behaviours guiding our common life. The Third Paradise is the great myth that leads everyone to take personal responsibility in the global vision. The symbol of the Third Paradise, a reconfiguration of the mathematical infinity sign, is made of three consecutive circles. The two external circles represent all the diversities and antinomies, among which nature and artifice, The central one is given by the compenetrating of the opposite circles and represents the generative womb of a new humanity?" (Michelangelo Pistoletto, 2003).

Dr Andrea Nanetti

ADM Associate Chair (Research)