“Someone who writes poetry has to live with an existential contradiction: on the one hand, you cannot make a living from it; on the other hand, you cannot live without it. I became aware of this tension at a very early age.”

For Tomaso Carnetto, poetry was never confined to literary production. It functioned from the outset as an operational mode: a way of registering movements, decisions, relations, and constraints as they unfold in lived reality. This necessity led him to work across disciplines and professions—training as a carpenter, studying design, practicing free arts, founding a new-media agency in the 1990s, and teaching—each step understood as a concrete extension of poetic attention into material, social, and technological contexts.

This trajectory culminated in the development of the Disegno Lectures, where poetry is no longer treated as expression but as method: a systematic practice of objectifying perception, deconstructing given forms, formalising relations, and composing situations of participation. In this sense, poetry becomes a tool for designing realities rather than representing them.

Alongside this work, Carnetto served as chairman of the Albert-Schweitzer-Association, deepening the ethical dimension of practice-based thinking. Since 2007, he has co-directed the Academy of Visual Arts, Frankfurt together with Seyyal Carnetto, where the Disegno Lectures continue to evolve as a pedagogical framework in which poetry operates as a lifelong discipline of attention, responsibility, and form-giving.