On Tuesday, September 8,2026,at 5: 30 pm, at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice, the Padua-based cultural association SOPHIA NOVA - L’Unità del Sapere presents "The Human Enigma: Knowledge and Its Shadow, " a six-part audiovisual poem rooted in the thought of philosopher Carlo Sini, a national member of the Accademia dei Lincei, and the epistemology of mathematician Giuseppe Longo. The screening will be followed by a conversation at the intersection of science, philosophy, and art, featuring an international panel of distinguished figures from the world of culture, including: - Giuseppe Longo, mathematician and epistemologist, Research Director Emeritus of the CNRS at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and member of the Académie Europée; - Giorgio Bonaccorso, theologian and epistemologist, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Pastoral Liturgy in Padua; - Francesco Chillemi, Founder and President of the cultural association SOPHIA NOVA – L’Unità del Sapere, Ph. D, Rutgers University (USA), Professor at the Catholic University; - Pierluigi Sacco, Full Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Chieti-Pescara, Senior Advisor to the OECD, and Senior Researcher at metaLAB (at) Harvard (video presentation). With a lightning-fast journey through time, the audiovisual reconstructs the genealogy of Western knowledge, amidst the power and allure of abstraction: from cave paintings to ideographic writings, to the alphabetic transcription of the voice; from philosophy and mathematics in ancient Greece to modern science, to contemporary reductionisms of the body as a biological machine and of thought as a neural and computable network. This immersive narrative reflects on the relationship between thought, language, and knowledge, with the precision of an academic essay, the breadth of poetry, and the power of images capable of translating the vision of some of the most eminent thinkers and scientists in Western history. From Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid to Galileo and Descartes, to Hilbert, Gödel, and Turing. In this audiovisual work, SOPHIA NOVA's three areas of action are harmoniously combined. The audiovisual work addresses the contents of CONSCIENTIA—the field of epistemological reflection on the foundations and limits of each discipline; it draws on the artistic expression of INGENIA—the field of creating aesthetic works that illuminate the blind spot of formalism and dogmatism; and it offers itself as an educational tool for PAIDEIA—the field of designing immersive and transdisciplinary educational experiences. QUESTIONS AT THE CENTER OF THE RESEARCH

The association's research develops along several lines: the genealogy of forms of knowledge, from the first writings to artificial intelligence; the implicit presuppositions of science; the intersections between different cultures; and the translation of all this into creative works and educational programs. This work begins with several fundamental questions. The first question runs through the history of Western thought and is urgent today: how do we know the world, and what escapes us of what we think we know? The answer this project proposes overturns an ancient habit. We are led to believe that knowledge reveals reality itself, like a faithful mirror. The underlying theme of the six episodes, however, is an understanding that overturns common sense: every form of our knowledge does not reveal reality; it configures it. We are not its external observers; we are a part of it, enigmatically self-conscious and creative. The disciplines of Western knowledge—philosophy, logic, mathematics, science, or computer science—are not mirrors of a hypothetical structure of the world, but formidable lenses that shape it, each in its own way and each on a path of evolution and transformation. This is the shadow the work invites us to contemplate, lest we fall prey to today's dogmatic reductionisms, including scientism, relativism, nihilism, and supposed artificial intelligence. The questions addressed are particularly timely today. Do machines think? Do they learn? Will they one day understand? According to the project, these questions risk being formulated misleadingly and are already the wrong answer because they all arise from the same confusion: mistaking calculation for knowledge and reducing every path of thought to its result. A machine doesn't learn, it overwrites: it elaborates statistical correlations on what has already been written, and it cannot exceed its own code; On the contrary, human intelligence is precisely that which can exceed pre-established formalizations, to the point of breaking paradigms believed to be certain. Isn't it strange that logic and calculus, taken to their very core, have revealed their own limits? Gödel and Turing demonstrated it: no formal system can found itself, no algorithm can include its own constitutive act. The intelligence that invented