Cross-Cultural Synergies for an Inner Education
Sossio’s Engagement in Cultural Diplomacy with the Forces for Inner Education
Florence,
A meeting of cultural figures: Elio D’Anna, founder and President of the European School of Economics; Her Excellency Sheikha Hala Al Khalifa, former Director General of Culture and Arts at the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities; the artist Sossio; and global entrepreneur Mohamed Ogbi. Visionaries brought together by a shared understanding: that a higher reality cannot simply be demanded of the world. It must first be conceived, embodied and projected from within.
The meeting turned on a single question: where does real change begin? For leaders in education, culture and enterprise, the answer determines where effort is directed. If change begins in structures, the work lies in reforming systems and institutions; if it begins in the person, it lies first in what people think, value and believe. The four shared the second view and explored what such change requires: an inner education, and how people from different cultures can learn it from one another.
The setting was the European School of Economics, which counts the meeting of cultures and the union of art and business among its core pillars. Its rooms hold a dedicated collection of Sossio’s works; as the ESE by Sossio page puts it, the collection lives inside the school as part of the learning environment, “not as decoration”.
The Inner Economy
The second view is the thesis of Elio D’Anna, ESE President and founder of the school where the four met. The author of The School for Gods and The Technology of the Dreamer, he advances the principles of what he calls the Inner Economy, which he presents as the only route to a new global economic paradigm. Before anything changes outside, he holds, something has to change within. In his reading, the structures we call reality sit downstream of ideas, values and beliefs: change those, and the structures follow.
In Florence he put it in these terms:
“The world outside is a mirror reflection of our inner states and conditions.
What we call reality: the structures of finance, industry, science, technology, and culture, is ultimately the projection of an invisible world: the world of our ideas, values, beliefs, and Being.
This is why every true transformation begins within.
We are entering the dawn of a new Era of Golden Creative Leisure: a time for a new, silent revolution — not a revolution of systems, but an individual revolution capable of transforming man by man, cell by cell, and through the individual, the entire world.”
Two consequences follow for those who lead institutions. The first concerns method: if structures are the projection of ideas, values and beliefs, reform aimed at structures alone would leave their source untouched. The second concerns scale: the change D’Anna anticipates reaches the world only through the individual, so its unit is the person.
One premise, four fields
D’Anna applies the thesis first to leadership, speaking in Florence about the importance of inner education for rulers and kings. If the outer world mirrors the inner one, the inner life of those who rule shapes far more than their own. It follows that preparing anyone who holds authority would include, alongside knowledge and technique, the formation of the person: the ideas, values and beliefs from which decisions are taken. At the same meeting, D’Anna launched the Kingmanship course, created by the European School of Economics, which calls itself “the school without borders”.
Her Excellency Sheikha Hala bint Mohammed Al Khalifa, a Bahraini cultural leader, came to the meeting as both an artist and a cultural administrator. She trained at Tufts University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and set up the education programmes of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. She has brought to museums and public programmes the conviction that art can transform, illuminate and educate.
Sossio brings the premise to painting. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, he moved to Tuscany in the 1980s and left figuration behind; since then his canvases have been built from colour-based linguistic modules rather than recognisable forms. His biography names his encounter with D’Anna, and the book Keys of the Creative Universe, as decisive for the direction his painting took.
Together, Sossio and Elio D’Anna created the Self Transformism movement, an “individual revolution” that treats each person as the only creator of their own reality, with the world of events reflecting their state of being. Sossio’s abstract canvases carry no story to decode and no figures to follow; their fields of colour and material ask nothing specific of the viewer. One of them, The ignorance that knows all (2012), hangs at the school.
For educators and cultural institutions, Sheikha Hala’s conviction and the collection’s place in the school point the same way: if art educates, it belongs where people learn and decide, as well as in the gallery. On this view, the environment in which people learn forms part of what they learn.
Global entrepreneur Mohamed Ogbi brings to the conversation the experience of putting ideas into practice in enterprise, and in the spaces where people live and work. A strategist and an alumnus of the school, he is Senior Advisor at ProImpact Marketing Consultancy and a creative leader whose work bridges business innovation and cultural vision. He has worked on 70 international projects across 23 sectors. Drawing on his studies in economics, psychology and communication, he sees art as a spiritual and social architecture, able to transform perception and redefine how we inhabit space.
For organisations, the implications are twofold. If structures follow ideas, values and beliefs, as D’Anna argues, the inner formation of those who lead becomes a strategic matter. If art can transform perception, as Ogbi holds, art in the places where people work helps to shape it.
An exchange across cultures
The meeting crossed cultures as well as disciplines: the Gulf and Italy, the museum and the business school, the studio and enterprise. Around a table set with tea and pastries, four people from different fields took up one question. Sheikha Hala’s record links the first pair: in December 2020 Italy awarded her the Order of the Star of Italy for her work on cultural relations between Italy and Bahrain.
If an inner education can be learned across cultures, it belongs to no single tradition, and every culture can practise it. For institutions that work internationally, the exchange between cultures thus becomes part of education itself.
Significance for institutions
The meeting’s significance lies in the coherence of its premise. The four came from education and leadership, from cultural institutions, from art and from enterprise, yet shared one starting point, central to D’Anna’s Inner Economy: that structures follow from ideas, values and beliefs. Real change, in the view set out at the meeting, begins with the individual, through an inner education. In the rooms of the European School of Economics, where Sossio’s works form part of the setting for study, the proposition that art educates already has a visible form.
