The mosaic sculpture "The Vitruvian Woman" by Francesca Chialà

Piazza della Transalpina—the site of the historic reunification of Gorizia and Nova Gorica and the symbolic heart of GO! 2025—will host the mosaic sculpture "The Vitruvian Woman," an installation by artist, performer, director, and sociologist Francesca Chialà, from July 16 to December 31, 2025, symbolically accompanying the entire period of the European Capital of Culture.

The inauguration is scheduled for Wednesday, July 16, at 9:30 a.m., with the Mayor of Gorizia, Rodolfo Ziberna, and artist Francesca Chialà, who will involve many children in a spectacular Body Art Performance to promote Peace and the salvation of the Planet.

A second artistic performance is scheduled for Friday, July 18, at 9:30 a.m., with guests from the "Sergio Amidei" International Film Award.

Inspired by the music and guided by Chialà, the children paint with their bodies the long Peace Canvases, arranged in a square around the mosaic circle of the Transalpina, which recalls the Wall torn down in the center of the square, on the border between Italy and Slovenia.

Made from tiny glass fragments and gold leaf, Chialà's mosaic sculpture is set within a sacred geometry—a metal circle and square—and features a man and a woman balanced in the yoga tree pose, symbolizing the harmony between masculine and feminine, East and West, science and spirituality.

After its inauguration at the Venice Arsenale during the 2024 Art Biennale, the Vitruvian Woman arrives in a place steeped in memory and meaning, where until 2004 a wall stood dividing peoples, cultures, and histories.

Today that wall has been torn down and, right where the border met, the work was chosen for its profound meaning and the artist-sociologist for her constant activism in promoting peace and unity between peoples.

The Vitruvian Woman is the body that becomes a bridge, that doesn't measure but embraces. She is the living icon of a reconciled boundary, transformed from barrier to threshold, from wound to possibility.

This figure embodies the profound vocation of GO! 2025: a Europe that rediscovers itself through mutual listening, through culture as a common language, through shared transformation.

At the exact point where East and West separated, the mosaic sculpture is a symbol of harmony between East and West, between masculine and feminine, between past and future.

A work that breathes with the square, transforming the border space into a geography of encounter.

For Chialà, art is not simple representation but an active presence, to be experienced and inhabited, where the boundary between artist and spectator dissolves.

The choice of glass, a fragile and transparent yet resistant and transformative material, recalls the very concept of a border as a delicate threshold to be crossed with care, but also as a reflective surface capable of transforming light.

Each fragment of glass, recomposed in the mosaic, tells of a gesture of reconciliation, a balance between differences, a new language of harmony.

The Vitruvian Woman transfigures the boundary, recomposing it like a shard of glass that finds meaning in the larger picture and restores it as a space of encounter. It is the gesture of an art that does not separate but unites, that does not divide but mends, that does not impose but harmonizes.

The image of the man, generated with generative artificial intelligence by combining a human body with the face from Leonardo da Vinci's drawing, was transformed into a mosaic by the masters of Spilimbergo.

Chialà chose to bring together innovation and such an ancient art to visually represent the urgency of a message: only if science and technology are put at the service of the Earth can we save marine ecosystems and combat climate change.

The Vitruvian Woman goes beyond art; it is an evolutionary vision, an ethical manifesto, and a call to action.

The work's meaning is profound and multifaceted: only women and men together can save the planet, if they are capable of harmonizing their feminine and masculine selves within themselves—Anima and Animus, as Carl Gustav Jung defined them.

It is this integration of opposites—between sensitivity and rationality, strength and gentleness, spirituality and civic engagement—that makes a new balance between body, spirit, and planet possible. The Vitruvian Woman draws inspiration from Leonardo's famous drawing, but consciously reverses its perspective: the human being inscribed within the circle and the square is no longer at the center to measure, control, or dominate, but to belong, embrace, and harmonize.

Francesca Chialà has chosen to transcend the Renaissance vision in which man was the measure of all things and at the center of the world to assert dominion over the environment.

And although the title—"The Vitruvian Woman"—might suggest a juxtaposition with the male figure, or a celebration of women as humanity's sole saviors, the work's message is precisely the opposite: it is not women alone who can heal the world, but women and men together, on a shared path of evolution and rebalancing.

To give form to this vision, Chialà chose to transform into a mosaic a woman and a man united in the same gesture, the same posture, to visibly express the balance between the two polarities, Yin and Yang, that inhabit every human being and every civilization that aspires to peace, justice, and coexistence.

The two figures are suspended in the tree pose, a gesture of balance and grounding, upward thrust and silent centering.

A living form that combines strength and grace, stability and lightness. It is the sign of a dance between Yin and Yang. A body that bridges opposites, that does not exclude but integrates, that reconciles body and soul, visible and invisible, external and internal.

And so, too, the circle and the square do not oppose, but embrace. They do not contain, but accompany. They are a threshold and an embrace between heaven and earth, where nothing is excluded and everything can coexist. The balance between the bodies in the mosaic-sculpture is the representation of a vision the artist wishes to foster: only by cultivating the feminine within each of us—as in listening, welcoming—will we be able to stop plundering the Earth and fighting each other.

In the context of GO! 2025, the Vitruvian Woman becomes a collective archetype to be reinterpreted and explored. A living symbol of regeneration and coexistence, it speaks to today's Europe and invites us to rediscover a forgotten quality: the Feminine as a creative and transformative force, to be cultivated in every human being and in every territory. With this work, Francesca Chialà offers more than just an image: she offers a manifesto for our time.

The Vitruvian Woman is, in fact, the beating heart of the artistic movement she founded, "The FESTIVAL of the 7 ARTS," to promote Human, Social, and Environmental Rights.

It is art that becomes life, a shared gesture, a participatory experience. A poetic and political invitation to rethink borders not as lines that divide, but as spaces that generate new relationships and imaginations.

A new humanism, where masculine and feminine, human beings and nature, art and life merge into a more equitable and inclusive vision of the world.

In this age that demands bridges, not walls, The Vitruvian Woman reminds us that every human being has a duty to engage and can become a threshold: a living passage between worlds, cultures, and languages. A possible embrace in the heart of Europe.

Francesca Chialà, dubbed an "artivist" by the media, goes beyond aesthetic reflection or political critique: she activates concrete processes of social and environmental innovation, rooted in places and people's bodies. Her performances are always public and free, grounded in the Gift Economy, because art—in her vision—must be a common good, a universal language accessible to all, an engine of real transformation.

Her poetics blend artistic gesture and real impact, spirituality and civic action, aesthetics and regeneration, generating alliances and transforming spaces and relationships.

In her work, public art and collective responsibility intertwine. Her performances, rooted in local communities, are spaces of healing and mobilization, a shared breath, a boundary to be crossed together.

Chialà has brought this vision from the margins to urban centers, in Italy and abroad: along the Tiber, in the suburbs of Rome, with orphaned children in Vietnam, and in the battles to protect the Venice Lagoon. Each of her interventions is a secular ritual, a gesture of beauty that heals, restores, and gives voice to those who have none. In 2025, her artistic journey will also reach Japan, at the Osaka EXPO, where she was invited by UNESCO in Paris to represent the connection between creativity, sustainability, and human rights.

With the founding of the movement La FESTA delle 7 ARTI, Francesca Chialà has created an ecosystem to innovatively and performatively intertwine different artistic disciplines and stimulate the civic engagement of numerous artists, musicians, singers, dancers, poets, actors, architects, archaeologists, and athletes.

She blends visual arts, music, dance, film, theater, poetry, and even sports, transforming each performance into a collective ritual that restores art's social function.

His projects are spaces of care and mobilization in which the community is an integral part of the work.

The artist-sociologist proposes joy as resistance, an activism made of intertwined and barrier-free arts, creating a true “Transborder” Art.