Spend six weeks exploring human existence at the intersection of art, science & nature and challenge yourself to rethink the future and your role in it.

BE IMMERSED IN THE PRACTICE OF CREATIVES TO FIND NEW WAYS OF BEING.

ELEVATE THE UNIQUELY HUMAN CAPABILITIES NO MACHINE CAN REPLICATE.

push the limits of your CREATIVITY.

accentuate WHAT ONLY EXIStS in person.

Be the future.

WHY VENICE?

Venice 1577

A thriving hotbed of innovation and a major centre of trade. That's still what makes Venice great today. As well as the incandescent beauty, the proximity of extraordinary natural heritage, the rhythm of pedestrian life, and the huge concentration of art and other treasures. Plus the water, of course, and the rhythm of its twice daily tides.

Within this awe inspiring setting, a new era of regeneration is taking hold. Heralded as the city of the future and the World Sustainability Capital, just a stone's throw from Italy's leading incubator, Venice is increasingly home to forward thinking organisations making their mark on the world.

Not forgetting we're in Italy, where modern life is anchored in a culture thousands of years old, lighthearted but full of ritual, where the quality of your everyday food is the most important thing on earth (well, after family).

This is the backdrop for our six week program focused on nurturing the distinctly human capabilities critical to success today. We use the arts to breakthrough thinking into imagining and feeling.  To celebrate the future and our role in it while enjoying all that Venice has to offer.

Tu parli Veneziano, ma non lo sai.

Watch the TedTalk You speak Venetian, but you don't know it by Alberto Toso Fai.

YOU

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YOU *

• have achieved success and want new challenges to prepare for the fast moving future of work.

• see travel as essential to international perspective & networks.

• wish to enjoy Europe within a structure offering insider intel, self reflection & foundational knowledge.

• interested in implicit cultural understanding, intercultural exchange, working culture & creating cultural value.

• keen to condition and centre through practical tasks to advance, make new patterns, generate new energy.

• ready to be open minded, to fully engage, to imagine an extraordinary future.

  • Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life.

    Mark Twain

  • We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.

    Rick Rubin, music producer

  • Practice any art...no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

    Kurt Vonnegut, writer

  • Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”. If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future.

    Elise Boulding, sociologist

  • Art dies when crowds inspire its destinies.

    Hermann Maier Lund, music critic

  • Culture is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity

    Aristotle, philosopher

  • our effort, our desire, our continual longing... To make meaning of the world around us through materials

    Sarah Sze, Visual Artist, Columbia University

  • Culture is the only asset of humanity that, when divided between us all, becomes greater

    Hans Georg Gadamer, philosopher

  • Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement.

    Sir Ken Robinson, Arts in Schools Project

  • Things rarely go as planned... but you have a choice: You can either crumble in defeat or create something unexpected and beautiful.

    Suleika Jaouad Batiste, writer

  • Comparison is the thief of joy.

    Theodroe Roosevelt, Nobel laureate 1906

  • The Creative Industries are vital for sustainable development.

    Marisa Henderson, United Nations

  • How, exactly, is one to fully inhabit one’s experience at a time when three and a half billion of us are sharing our thoughts on the Internet

    Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

  • Students who have taken a year or two off are much more ready to learn, much more ready to encounter diversity of views .

    Jonathan Haidt, Heterodox Academy

  • The skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems.

    Temple Grandin, author & professor of behavioural science

  • The capacity of theatre to transform lives through personal empowerment

    Kate Winslet, actor

  • What Hopper discovered was that when the people are gone, the buildings come to life.

    Christopher Benfey, Emily Dickinson Scholar

  • The only constant in life is change.

    Heraclitus, philosopher

  • Solitude creates clarity. Clarity creates meaning.

    Mike Erwin, Positivity Project

  • The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

    Marcel Proust, novelist

  • Chance has always been my best assistant

    Agnès Varda, artist

  • I am a part of all that I have met

    Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet

  • I feel at home everywhere. You’re at home in your mind, and if you’re at home with whatever you do, then you’re quite relaxed any place.

    Nicolas Berggruen, philanthropist

  • Art is the highest form of hope.

    Hans Ulrich Obrist