“Educating ourselves to beauty to find happiness”

The philosopher Maura Gancitano, guest of the CombinAzioni festival in Volpago del Montello, gives her “recipe”

VOLPAGO DEL MONTELLO. Beauty this is known. Often a prisoner of the rules and a victim of established definitions. There could not have been a better place, than the land of Canova, the artist who made beauty with art, to meet the philosopher Maura Gancitano with Andrea Colamedici, guests on Saturday 10 September at 9 pm of the CombinAzioni Festival at Villa Loredan di Volpago del Montello for the meeting with the public entitled “Educating yourself to beauty”.

«Today’s Canova resides in the ability to linger on things, expanding to them and going in depth. In a time when the level of social happiness is dramatically decreasing, we have no choice but to expand into life, freeing ourselves from the conditioning of beauty »suggests Gancitano.

How do you succeed in this venture?

«Beauty must be brought back to the sense of mystery, beauty is such because it comes out of the ordinary and norms. Today the virtuality of the image has great space in our lives, social networks parcel and make us more inattentive, the word weakens and even the single thing. We are perpetually in search of the shocking and thus we lose the shocking that is in the small detail ».

What exercises will we be able to do?

«Attention to beauty can be cultivated and even re-cultivated if we are out of practice. Reading is a great exercise because it helps regain skills that have to do with contemplation. Then there are the philosophical tools that have to do with practice and emotions. After all, philosophy is a training of wonder practiced through thought, writing, speech, play and movement ».

We are going through an uncertain time, months of pandemic, a nearby war, the mounting of social aggression, how can we deal with all this?

“There are many alarm bells and it would take a sentimental education carried out in families, by school but also at the community level. Parents, educators, psychologists must commit themselves to education and the dissemination of beauty, understood as a welcoming social atmosphere, which allows people to flourish ».

To know the whole program of the Combinazioni Festival: www.combinazionifestival.it.