A Thought for Arnaldo Pomodoro

At the heart of form, a silent breach opens: it doesn’t tear, it reveals.
It doesn’t shout, but ignites.
It is there, in that subtle tension, that matter ceases to be mere surface and begins to speak, with a voice that is deep, ancient, and future-bound.

In Arnaldo Pomodoro’s Sfera di San Leo, everything is both consumed and renewed, like an ancient gesture that defies both time and skin.
Facing that sculpture, nestled like a secret in the living stone of the fortress, I understood, for the first time with blinding clarity, what it truly means to touch the soul of an era through the language of a great master.

Arnaldo Pomodoro has left us.
But he has not left a void.
He has left a threshold.
An open curve that invites us to go beyond the visible, beyond the boundary of form.

His Sfera di San Leo resonates today with a renewed intensity.
Unlike his previous spheres—polished, perfect, still holding onto the illusion of harmony—this sculpture is a body exposed, a sculptural document of a world that has stopped pretending.
Its surface, etched with arrows, braces, and teeth, bears the imprint of an inner medieval siege, as if an ancient weapon had detonated from within.
And yet, in the very heart of that tension, something simple and astonishing occurs: a small, smooth, polished sphere emerges.

It is not repair.
It is poetic resistance.

And today, more than ever—at a time when we could not have expected to feel his absence so deeply—the loss of Arnaldo Pomodoro pierces us profoundly, precisely as Future Museum becomes involved in new projects intimately dialoguing with his work, and in particular with the Sfera di San Leo, which has become not only a symbol for us, but a living architecture of thought and vision.

At the center of our ongoing research, amid the sediment of industrial memory, the fractures of landscape, and the codes of new materials, this Sfera has become far more than a sculpture.
It has become method.
It is not to be admired from a distance, but rather crossed—inhabited.

In our international projects—from immersive installations in the UAE’s tech districts, to art-and-intelligence laboratories across Asia, from the repurposed quarry spaces of ENCI in Maastricht, to experimental construction sites in Basel—we carry forward an idea of creation that is deeply Pomodorian:
an art that does not seek answers, but openings.
That does not build façades, but thresholds.
That does not soothe, but sets alight.

Because Pomodoro did not sculpt forms.
He sculpted attitudes.

The Sfera di San Leo is not a closed object.
It is a living narrative in matter.
A tale of conflict and tenderness, of time and regeneration, of landscape and body.
That scarred, fractured, rising surface is the same that pulses through our spaces, our thinking, our practices. No longer surface, but ecosystem.

And I, as a curator, as a woman, as a restless observer of this fragile era, find myself within that threatened sphere, in that fracture that still knows how to hold light.
In every break, the possible.
In every wound, a vision.

Pomodoro asks just one thing of us:
not to avoid chaos, but to walk through it.
And that small, polished, untarnished sphere is not a symbol.
It is an invitation.
To not fear erosion.
To not escape history.
To emerge, each day, not to restore what has been lost,
but to give new form to what is yet to be born.

And so his work—so too his absence—becomes, for us, a generative space,
a thought that continues to shape the future.

In memory of Arnaldo Pomodoro,
and in attentive listening to the matter that endures,
that answers,
that is reborn.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved