Inside the Academy of the New Made in Italy How Accademia Italiana bridges its schools with the world of Italian excellence
When an academy spreads a new concept of Made in Italy, it is building far more than an aesthetic. It is shaping a way of thinking, designing, and reading the present through culture, territory, craft, imagination, and responsibility. Accademia Italiana works on this idea: a Made in Italy that is alive, active, and capable of stepping beyond the reassuring repertoire of tradition to become a contemporary language, a method of research and shared practice within a community. The Final Work is one of the places where this vision takes shape.
For Accademia Italiana, the Final Work is not simply a graduation thesis, but a parallel project, reserved for students in their final years — the third year of the three-year programme and the second year of the two-year programme — built each time around an external curator, always a prominent figure from the world of international creativity, and a single, cross-disciplinary theme that runs through all departments: fashion, design, graphics, jewellery, and photography. The best works selected by the curator come together in a bilingual publication and a final exhibition open to the public.
This initiative says a great deal about how Accademia Italiana understands its own identity: an AFAM institution founded in 1984, with campuses in Florence and Rome and now part of the international AD Education network, committed to training creative professionals capable of moving fluidly across disciplines, languages, and design fields. Professionals who, while grounded in a specific area of study, develop a method and a vision applicable to a wide range of contexts, ultimately becoming all-round creatives, able to read, interpret, and transform contemporary complexity.
The Final Work has now reached its third edition. Three curators, three themes, three different ways of approaching the project: Fabio Viola in 2024, Matteo Ward in 2025, Matteo Cibic in 2026.
The 2026 Final Work: AIdentities, with Matteo Cibic
For the most recent edition, Accademia Italiana chose Matteo Cibic, an Italian transmedia artist born in 1983, trained at the Politecnico di Milano, Kingston University, and Fabrica, known for playful, anthropomorphic objects that combine function and irony, and for work exhibited at venues including the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Shanghai Museum of Glass, the Triennale di Milano, and the Museo del Gioiello in Vicenza.
The chosen theme is AIdentities, a curatorial journey developed over recent months with students from the Florence and Rome campuses, centred on identity, sustainability, material research, artificial intelligence, and the social role of design. "In the young people I met through this experience, I recognised a desire to exist without being forced to explain themselves completely," Cibic said, speaking of a generation that "moves through the present with fluid and unstable languages" and that finds, in the handmade gesture, in error, in the traces of time on materials, what distinguishes human intelligence from artificial intelligence.
As the Academy's leadership recalls in the introduction to the publication — from AD Education Italia's general director Nicola Accurso to academic director Filippo Pernisco, from Rome campus manager Livia Di Nardo to the coordinators of the individual departments — this year's theme of identity was read as a tension between individual uniqueness and collective belonging, between memory and cultural heritage and the drive to express oneself through new languages. The outcomes of the project were presented to the public at two events last June: in Florence, during Pitti Uomo, and then in Rome, both featuring talks and vernissages in the presence of Matteo Cibic, companies, and industry professionals.
Previous editions
In 2025, the curatorial role was entrusted to Matteo Ward, entrepreneur and sustainability advocate, CEO of IO Fashion Textiles Home and co-founder of WRÅD, with the theme Youthopia: an invitation to students to imagine possible worlds, with utopia as the ethical direction of design and dystopia as a critical mirror of the present.
For the format's inaugural edition, held in 2024, the curator was Fabio Viola, one of Italy's leading experts in gamification, with the project Let's plAI, presented at the Museo Sant'Orsola in Florence during Pitti Immagine Uomo: a journey that placed play at the heart of the work of over 100 students, as a language capable of breaking down cultural and linguistic barriers.
Game design, sustainability, imagination, and material culture thus become territories of exchange where ideas cross-pollinate, change direction, and discover new possibilities. Italian genius takes on a more contemporary form: collective intelligence, relational capacity, dialogue between disciplines, and the ability to transform constraints, legacies, and contradictions into new imaginaries. The Final Work activates a community that works, debates, experiments, and builds the future of design — for Accademia Italiana, that future is born here too, in the continuous movement between thought, practice, and dialogue.
