Why do some works of art stay with us long after we’ve left the gallery, while others disappear almost as quickly as we’ve seen them?
In this episode of Extraordinary Creatives, I’m joined by Lucia Pietroiusti, a curator whose work has consistently challenged how we experience art, institutions and the role creativity can play in helping us understand ourselves and the world around us.
Lucia is Head of Research & Emergence at the Hartwig Museum in Amsterdam, Curator of the 2027 Autostrada Biennale, and was the curator behind Sun & Sea, the extraordinary opera-performance that won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Throughout her career she has become known for championing ambitious, experimental practices that ask audiences to participate emotionally as much as intellectually.
Rather than creating work that simply explains ideas, Lucia is interested in creating the conditions where something unexpected can happen. The artworks she champions often refuse certainty. They ask difficult questions, invite discomfort and create experiences that unfold gradually, revealing themselves over time rather than offering immediate answers.
In this conversation, we explore why the most powerful art often speaks to the body before it speaks to the mind. Lucia reflects on the extraordinary response to Sun & Sea, describing how visitors arrived expecting one experience and left carrying something entirely different. The work touched emotions that many people had not yet found words for, reminding us that art can sometimes recognise something within us before we are able to recognise it ourselves.
We also talk about the role of institutions and what it means to genuinely support artists. Lucia offers a compelling vision of museums and cultural organisations not as places that simply commission individual projects, but as spaces capable of holding a piece of an artist’s life. Instead of working to short-term cycles, she argues for slower, more generous ways of thinking that allow ideas the time they need to develop.
Throughout our conversation, she returns to the idea that creativity cannot always be controlled. Ideas behave like living things. They move, evolve and surprise us. Rather than forcing them towards predetermined outcomes, perhaps our role is to create environments where they can continue growing.
Ultimately, this is a conversation about courage. The courage to make work that does not seek immediate approval, to build institutions that prioritise care over speed, and to trust that the ideas worth following often reveal themselves slowly.
What We Learned from Lucia Pietroiusti
What stays with me most from this conversation is Lucia’s belief that the artworks which endure are often the ones that give shape to something we have been carrying without fully understanding it.
I loved her description of visitors arriving at Sun & Sea impatient, distracted and expecting little more than another exhibition, only to leave deeply moved. Not because the work offered easy answers, but because it recognised something they had not yet been able to name. There is something profoundly hopeful in that idea. Art can sometimes find language for experiences that have been sitting quietly inside us all along.
I was also struck by the way Lucia speaks about time. So much of contemporary culture is driven by urgency, deadlines and measurable outcomes. Yet she invites us to think instead in terms of gardens and forests rather than project plans. To imagine institutions that grow alongside artists instead of simply asking for another finished piece of work.
Her image of ideas behaving like people has stayed with me too. Ideas are not static objects waiting to be delivered. They move, change, surprise us and occasionally refuse to become what we expected. Our role as creatives may be less about controlling them and more about creating the conditions where they can continue to evolve.
Perhaps that is the deeper invitation from this conversation.
To stop asking whether the work is immediately understood.
To stop measuring success by comfort or certainty.
And instead to ask whether the work loosens something that has remained knotted for a long time.
Because the art that stays with us is rarely the art that tells us what we already know.
It is the art that quietly helps us discover something we didn’t yet have the words to say.
Thank you for listening.
