Vatican. ArtCut reflects on how “to remain human” in the digital age

Sunder the theme “Exercises in Empathy” (“Exercises of Empathy”), the initiative of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, led by the Portuguese Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, will take place between 2026 and 2027 in eight cities of seven countries and three continents, bringing together 104 artists, 14 curators and seven Catholic universities, culminating in 2028, the year in which the next edition of the Biennial of Art of Venice takes place.

In an interview with Lusa, Nuno Crespo, director of the School of Arts of the Portuguese Catholic University and chief curator of the triennial, stressed the unprecedented character of the project, which seeks to bring art, education and spirituality closer together.

“The Triennial of Art of Catholic Universities has its own agenda in this triangulation between art, education and spirituality, and then there is another factor that seems to me also very interesting and that most of the time is dissociated in the whole world, which is this articulation, art-education”, he said.

“ It is the first global contemporary art event in which proximity to universities is part of its genesis. None of this happens,” he added, arguing that universities, as producers of knowledge, should be active agents in today's great cultural and artistic debates.

The triennial is the result of an idea driven by Cardinal Tolentino of Mendonça, who presents it as a response to Pope Leo XIV's call in the encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas", dedicated to the safeguarding of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.

In the presentation text of the initiative, Tolentino de Mendonça states that empathy is an essential competence of Catholic universities and an indispensable tool for building knowledge, promoting dialogue between disciplines and facing contemporary social and cultural challenges.

“ Empathy is an increasingly indispensable tool to build and share knowledge, to weave reciprocity, to relaunch collaborative practices”, writes the Portuguese cardinal.

Although he rejects ArtCut as an institutional response of the Vatican to artificial intelligence, Nuno Crespo recognizes a convergence between the theme of the triennial and the concerns expressed by the Pope.

“There is a happy coincidence between the motto of the triennial and what is Pope Leo XIV’s background message about how we can remain human and protect humanity in these times of algorithms and zeros and ones,” he said.

This initiative also “is part of this enormous progress that the Catholic Church has made, namely from the pontificate of Pope Francis”, he argued, stressing that the triennial was conceived as a space of “free thought and free discussion”, arguing that the involvement of the Vatican does not mean institutional agreement with the political or artistic positions of the participants.

“Does the Vatican agree and endorse all the political positions of all artists and curators involved in this triennial? Nope. But it allows this conversation to exist. So there's this space of freedom. And I think that’s a very positive note.”.

According to the curator, digitization brought undeniable gains, but also challenges related to how people relate and build critical thinking.

“Responding to that is not denying the efficiency and extraordinary things that digitization has brought us, is it not? But it also brings us a challenge, it is how we can remain human in the midst of this avalanche that is an avalanche, in my view of dehumanization”.

For Nuno Crespo, the 104 artists gathered in the triennial are not united by aesthetic or generational affinities, but by a common view of art as transformative experience.

“ The common element is the use of artistic practices not as an end in itself, but as a tool or device that makes us have an experience that awakens other things in us”, he explained.

This dimension is summarized in a work by Brazilian artist Leonilson, integrated in the triennial, and that the curator considers emblematic of the project. It is a heart accompanied by the phrase “the thoughts of the heart”.

“ How can we put the heart back at the center of our thinking about the world, the other and ourselves? It seems to me a very provocative thing in 2026”, he considered.

ArtCut is presented by its promoters as a “school of empathy”, an expression used both by Tolentino de Mendonça and Nuno Crespo to describe a project that aims to put into dialogue different geographies, cultures and forms of knowledge.

In the healing text, Nuno Crespo defines the triennial as a “moral laboratory”, where each work and each exhibition function as exercises of approximation to the other.

“Art allows us to live more than a life”, he writes, arguing that artistic experience expands the human ability to imagine, understand and feel realities different from one’s own.

Asked about the current debates on artificial intelligence and artistic creation, the curator considered that it is still impossible to anticipate the scope of the ongoing transformations, but maintained that there is an essential dimension of art that remains linked to direct human experience.

Quoting the Encyclical of Leo XIV, Crespo stated that artificial intelligence could reorganize society in a way comparable to the impact of industrialization in the 19th century, although recognizing that it is still impossible to anticipate what will happen.

“ We do not know what the new model of social organization is going to be, we are far away, they are mechanisms that are still very much in their childhood, we are far from realizing not only their potentiality but their consequences”.

But “there is one thing that is a condition of artistic experience: the relationship between two sensitive bodies. My body and the body of the work”, he said, using the metaphor of “that the experience of art is like trying a food, no one can bite the apple [for us], we have to bite the apple, taste the apple”.

From their perspective, artists continue to play a decisive role precisely by challenging expectations and introducing the unexpected, unlike the algorithm, which makes “trying to guess what we like and what we want, based on what we have previously chosen.”.

“ With the artists it is the opposite, they are always challenging us, they are always taking off the carpet, they are always throwing us out standing, they are always telling us things that we do not like, we like with suspicion or we adhere to, and these are the good companions for these difficult times ", he said.

The first edition of ArtCut begins in Rio de Janeiro, on August 27, then passing through Santiago de Chile, Bogotá, Boston, Milan, Lisbon and Luanda, before culminating in Venice.

In Lisbon, the triennial will take place between October 12th and December 15th at the Portuguese Catholic University, bringing together works by Portuguese and international artists such as Andreia Santana, Aires Mateus, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Ana Vieira, Carlos Bunga, Daniel Blaufuks, Délio Jasse, Helena Almeida, Julião Sarmento, Martha Rosler, Mona Hatoum and William Eggleston.

On what he expects the public to withdraw from the exhibition visit, Nuno Crespo points out three objectives: to strengthen the cultural role of universities, to overthrow the stigma associated with the academic environment, the “site of boring conferences”; to draw attention to the “what artists have to tell us” and to their contribution to understanding the present; and to awaken “in each of us the ambition to be more human”, because “the triennial is nothing without artists”.

“ We're getting less and less human. There is a kind of motto that Wittgenstein, who is a philosopher I like very much, says, when thinking about his philosophy, which is: let us be more human”, he added.