The premises of "Unknown Unknowns" arose during the first lockdown. What traces remain of that moment of great human crisis in the project of the coming International exhibition of Milan Triennale?

The first symposium to prepare for the 23rd Milan Triennale was held on 4 March 2020, precisely on the first day of the closure forced by the lockdown. Starting with the issues raised by "Broken Nature," we tried to identify a theme. I talked about the universe, but there were also contributions on the oceans, biology, medicine, philosophy. I realized that there was a recurring ‘magic number.’ We know only a small 5% of the universe, the beds of the oceans, of our own knowledge and many other spheres. This percentage faces us with the vastness of mystery. So the challenge arose: how can we do an exhibition on what we don’t know? This led to the construction of an international network of agencies and institutions, representing a central element of "Unknown Unknowns." The Triennale has launched an international partnership with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and with the UN SDG Action Campaign, the initiative of the United Nations that mobilizes individuals and organizations all over the world to act for humanity.

In your view, why was an astrophysicist chosen to curate "Unknown Unknowns"?

Our present period of time, with its technological, biological and climate changes, has put us face to face with a different world. We have not discovered a new continent. We have discovered that reality is made of mysteries. It is not just that we barely know the deep universe, the ocean beds, the origin of our knowledge itself. Even the closer portions of the world have returned to being full of mystery: our bodies, our cities and the forests around them, the constellations and the planets. The immensity of this symbolic 95% of the unknown, before which we stand speechless, is rich in worlds, it is a promise of emotions and astonishment. But it is also an inevitable indicator of our inherent fragility. Finding ourselves faced for the first time by something unexpected transforms us and changes our perspective on the world. We thought we were living on an invincible and eternal planet. Now we discover that it is on the verge of becoming uninhabitable for many of the species that have populated it for millions of years. We thought we could foresee the near future, and the unexpected has overwhelmed us. With the pandemic the perimeter of the unknown has returned to a level of 100%. We begin again to question, to seek, to learn. Today, for the first time, we find ourselves going through a worldwide, collective and simultaneous experience of our inexorable vulnerability. This is a great opportunity to generate a new perspective and to develop new attitudes.

In a moment like this one, we might expect a Triennale made above all of questions. In your view, what are the most urgent and pertinent ones to which design will have to respond, in dialogue with science?

Design has to have the role of aggregation, as "Broken Nature" already demonstrated. The shared basis for dialogue is the change of perspective. The world of space, which is my background, embodies this attitude. Expanding the perspective, the known becomes something else. Starting with the very form of space: the profiles of the heavenly bodies that glow or are transformed into nothing represent the tireless work of a single great maker, the greatest designer of the cosmos: gravity. It is gravity that defines the geometry of the universe. A project, then, emerges in spacetime (spacetime, in physics, is the four-dimensional structure of the universe, ed). The unknown is an inexhaustible dimension – a margin traced on a border, a structural quality inherent to the nature of the universe itself and the forces that shape it. Ecology, science, architecture, art and design, together with culture as a whole, are called upon to intervene on what we thought of as a space of anthropocentric dominion. The exhibition will also include a series of international contributions, to represent the debate around transformations of the geopolitical order, intrinsically linked to changes in the climate, the economy and the demographic makeup of the planet. The movements of peoples are not just encounters with the unknown, but also a laboratory of production of a geopolitical future that can no longer resemble that of the present. The 23rd International Exhibition will be an exploration aimed at sharing, not owning.