PRESS RELEASE
PRESENTATION OF THE NEW JOURNAL
“POLYEDRUM: CULTURA ET EDUCATIO”
The journal POLYEDRUM: Cultura et Educatio is born, an expression of the Dicastery for Culture and Education. The presentation of the first issue will take place in Venice, at the Palazzo Ducale (Sala del Piovego) on Wednesday 6 November at 15.00.
After greetings from His Eminence Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, Dr. Fabrizio Magani, Superintendent for Archaeology, Fine Arts and the Landscape for the Municipality of Venice and the Lagoon, and Professor James P. Burns, President of Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, the magazine's financing body, the following will take the floor: Archbishop Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi, Secretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education and editor of the first issue, Dr. Mirta d'Argenzio, editor of the visual essay by Portia Zvavahera, and Professor Elena Beccalli, Rector Magnificent of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.
POLYEDRUM collects and re-launches in a profoundly renewed way the legacy of the journals Educatio Catholica and Culture and Faith, which were respectively an expression of the Congregation for Catholic Education and the Pontifical Council for Culture: with the Apostolic Constitution Praedicate Evangelium, dated 19 March 2022, the Holy Father merged the two departments into the new Dicastery for Culture and Education.
The title, POLYEDRUM, indicates the assumption of the approach to reality advocated by Pope Francis from the very beginning of his pontificate: “Our model is not the sphere, which is no greater than its parts, where every point is equidistant from the centre, and there are no differences between them. Instead, it is the polyhedron, which reflects the convergence of all its parts, each of which preserves its distinctiveness” (Evangelii Gaudium, 236). The journal, in fact, deals with the topics covered in a multifaceted manner, thanks to the diversity of approaches offered by the many disciplines and arts involved.
POLYEDRUM will be published annually. The journal is published as a monographic issue, presenting a collection of the best essays on a specific topic, selected by an international reading committee and appearing in the last two years from the journals of Catholic Schools, Catholic Universities, Faculties of Theology and Cultural Centres that make up the Holy See’s extraordinary international educational and cultural network.
The intention is to embrace, promote and circulate excellence wherever it manifests itself: in places considered “centres” and in those considered “peripheries”. In doing so, it is intended to respond to Pope Francis' invitation about the “urgency” of “networking” between the Church's different educational and cultural institutions (Veritatis gaudium, Proem 4 d).
The subject of the first issue of POLYEDRUM is intelligence and the multiplicity of its forms: Intelligenze multiple / Multiple Intelligences. The theme of intelligence is once again occupying the social and academic scene due to so-called Generative artificial intelligence. Attention intensified from 2022 onwards, when the arrival of Chat-GPT and other chatbots captured the public imagination, demonstrating the extraordinary speed of technological progress in the development of the potentialities of the digital world. The discussion is polarized on the possibly threatening outcomes of General artificial intelligence for humanity, or its indispensable beneficial contributions. The multi-faceted approach to the mystery of intelligence is the primary condition for avoiding disjointed reactions that give rise to obsessions and fixations far removed from reality, which is in any case superior to any abstract idea.
Beyond academic logic, the journal will offer spaces to other forms of intelligence, such as artistic forms, and therefore every issue of POLYEDRUM will host the work of an artist, giving space to their form of thought.
The artist chosen for this first issue is Portia Zvavahera, an African painter profoundly immersed in the ancestral culture of her people. This is how Mirta d'Argenzio introduces her in her visual essay and in the unpublished introductory text: “I visited Portia Zvavahera in her studio in Harare, Zimbabwe, where I spent ten days with her, witnessing the process of creating the latest paintings she conceived and painted in series, intended to illustrate our project on intelligence. In her case, intelligence expressed in the making of art and through the practice of her painting. My curatorial choice was shared with the artist, who decided to make available for this project some of her most significant works, hitherto unpublished. She allowed me to enter into it with her. Together with Portia, I selected and constructed the sequence of works that she helped me to relate to each other, revealing to me during the days spent in the studio, her most intimate and secret fears, linked to the elaboration of the painting and the creation of certain recurring images, which have accompanied her for years, mostly linked to her dreams. Personal dreams, which are images of thought, involuntary stories that speak about us”.
