The Mental Models of Systems Thinking: Tools for Seeing the Bigger Picture

When I enter an exhibition space, I never see artworks in isolation. Each piece appears to me as part of a web of relations—threads connecting histories, ideologies, ecologies, and futures. Systems thinking and the notion of mental models give me the language to describe this instinct: they remind me that what is visible in art is always underpinned by patterns, structures, and invisible assumptions that shape both creation and reception. Mental models are the frameworks through which we interpret reality, often unconsciously; systems thinking, meanwhile, pushes us to examine how parts interact, how feedback loops emerge, how consequences ripple beyond intention. Together they form a discipline of attention that has become central to my curatorial practice.

As curators, we work with objects, but more importantly with the unseen architectures that give them meaning. To bring works together is to surface the structures beneath the surface—the iceberg’s hidden mass of patterns, norms, and assumptions that determine what is remembered, what is forgotten, what is celebrated, what is silenced. Curating through systems thinking means resisting the temptation of linear narratives or isolated readings, and instead inviting visitors to perceive relationships and multiplicities. Art, in this sense, becomes an active diagram of thought, a living system through which one can glimpse how histories and futures converge.

This perspective has altered the way I design exhibitions. I no longer begin with the visible—works, mediums, or chronologies—but with the forces that connect them: colonial legacies, environmental entanglements, economic constraints, shifting ideologies. I imagine each show as a living map in which works function less as singular statements and more as nodes in a constellation of meaning. Visitors are not passive observers, but participants in this mapping, bringing their own perspectives into the web and altering it with their presence. In this way, curating becomes less about dictating interpretation than about creating conditions for dialogue, resonance, and even dissonance.

The implications extend beyond the gallery. Every curatorial decision generates consequences, some intended and others unforeseen. To choose which voices to include or exclude, to emphasize certain narratives over others, is to shape mental models in the public sphere. If I am not attentive, my choices may unconsciously reinforce dominant patterns and perpetuate exclusions. Systems thinking sharpens my awareness of these risks and encourages me to consider long temporal horizons: how will this exhibition live in memory, in archives, in institutional practice? What systemic effects might it spark—whether in the art market, in education, or in cultural discourse?

I find deep affinity between art and the very operations of systems thinking. Conceptual and relational practices remind us that meaning resides not in isolated objects but in the networks of relations they generate. Ecological art embodies the recognition that humans are entangled with more-than-human systems, challenging the mental model of separation. Institutional critique reveals how museums themselves are systems of power, where mental models of value and legitimacy are continuously reproduced. To engage with such practices as a curator is to move beyond aesthetic appreciation and into a terrain where art actively teaches us to see systems and to question the assumptions that hold them in place.

For me, the essence of curatorial work lies here: not in presenting finished statements, but in revealing underlying architectures of thought. Exhibitions are invitations to step beneath the surface, to trace feedback loops, to shift perspectives. They are proposals for new mental models—spaces where viewers might begin to ask: what else lies at play here? What do I take for granted? What unseen connections shape the visible? To see the bigger picture is never merely a matter of scale, but of courage: the courage to unsettle our own assumptions and to imagine otherwise.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved