Cosimo Cavallaro - Transforming the Ordinary into the Extraordinary.
- Mark Walmsley FRSA AGSM
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
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Meet Cosimo Cavallaro.
In this interview, I invited Cosimo to create his fantasy cultural year from the answers to some easy questions to which there were no wrong answers. Expect insights, surprises, laughter, anecdotes and some wonderful conversational detours.
Cosimo Cavallaro is a full member of The Arts and Culture Network, an internationally recognised artist, sculptor, filmmaker, and creator of some of the most provocative and memorable installation artworks of the past three decades.
If you missed Cosimo's live stream "Chocolate Jesus Melts" you can watch it on demand here.
Born in Montreal to Italian immigrant parents and raised between Canada and Italy, Cavallaro's artistic journey has taken him from sculpture studios and film sets to galleries, museums, public spaces, and international headlines.
His work spans an astonishing range of media, including photography, film, performance, monumental sculpture, and large-scale installations created from unconventional materials such as cheese, chocolate, ketchup, marshmallows, pressed ham, inflatables, steel, resin, and bronze.
Perhaps best known for his legendary cheese installations—including the famous Hotel Room 114, in which an entire New York hotel room was covered with thousands of pounds of melted Swiss cheese—Cosimo has built a career around placing familiar objects and materials into unfamiliar contexts, encouraging audiences to question their assumptions and engage with the world in new ways.
His works have attracted global media attention, appearing on CNN, BBC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNBC, and in publications ranging from Time magazine to the New York Times.
Yet beneath the headlines and controversy lies a deeply personal artistic philosophy rooted in transformation, spiritual enquiry, vulnerability, and the search for meaning.
Whether creating a life-sized chocolate Jesus to melt, constructing a cheese wall along the US–Mexico border, or exploring the symbolism of birth, identity, and human connection through sculpture and performance, Cavallaro consistently invites us to reconsider what we think we know—and to embrace the uncertainty that accompanies discovery.
Today, based in Los Angeles, Cosimo continues to create work that is playful, provocative, philosophical, and profoundly human. His art reminds us that transformation often begins when we look at something familiar and suddenly see it differently.
Cosimo Cavallaro's Fantasy Cultural Year ... with a magic wand and a time machine to hand.
Unlike many guests who choose a journey built around entertainment, tourism, or personal nostalgia, Cosimo's imagined year became a global exploration of trust, human connection, spirituality, identity, and the role art can play in helping us understand ourselves and each other. The result felt less like a travel itinerary and more like a living artwork.
The journey began with an extraordinary commission. A fictitious family foundation based in the UAE approached Cosimo with an offer that few artists could refuse: unlimited resources, first-class travel, complete creative freedom, and a global platform.
His task would be to travel the world creating a series of major public installations exploring peace, love, trust, and understanding between people and cultures. Upon completion, the project would become a bestselling book, a major TED Talk, and a global lecture tour.
Cosimo embraced the premise immediately, recognising it as an opportunity to explore the questions that have occupied him throughout his artistic life.
As we travelled through the year, it became clear that Cosimo was far less interested in creating monuments than in creating experiences. His instinct was always to explore what lies beneath the surface of human behaviour. Rather than presenting simple messages about harmony, he spoke about trust—the fragile but essential foundation upon which all human relationships are built. Art, in his view, has the ability to create spaces where people can encounter themselves and one another differently.
Music played a central role in the journey. When challenged to choose a soundtrack capable of accompanying a major artistic performance, Cosimo selected Ravel's Boléro, not in its familiar fifteen-minute form but looped repeatedly for two hours. The choice was deeply symbolic. Like much of his work, Boléro begins with simplicity and repetition before gradually building into something overwhelming and transformative. It mirrored the way his installations often evolve: a familiar material, repeated and reimagined until it reveals unexpected emotional and philosophical dimensions.
As the cultural year continued, we explored the performances and experiences that most interested him. Theatre emerged as a particularly important medium. Among the great dramatic works available to him, Cosimo was drawn to Shakespeare's Hamlet—a play concerned with identity, truth, mortality, and the struggle to understand one's place in the world. It felt entirely consistent with an artist whose career has repeatedly challenged audiences to question accepted narratives and confront uncomfortable truths.
Cinema revealed a similarly thoughtful side of his character. Rather than choosing an easy favourite or a feel-good classic, Cosimo selected Come and See, the acclaimed anti-war film widely regarded as one of the most powerful cinematic explorations of the human consequences of conflict. The choice reflected his enduring interest in human vulnerability and his belief that art should engage with difficult realities rather than merely provide distraction.
Throughout the imaginary year, discussions repeatedly returned to the relationship between art and spirituality. Cosimo spoke passionately about creativity as a pathway to understanding the universe and our place within it. For him, artistic creation is not simply the production of objects; it is a process of discovery. Whether working with cheese, chocolate, steel, inflatables, or found materials, his aim is often to reveal something hidden beneath everyday experience. The Fantasy Cultural Year became an extension of that philosophy, imagining a world in which large-scale public art could encourage dialogue, empathy, and reflection across cultural boundaries.
Perhaps the most memorable moment came at the end of the interview. After a year of unlimited possibilities—any historical figure, any artist, any philosopher, any political leader available for a private lunch—Cosimo surprised me completely. Rather than choosing Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Plato, Gandhi, or any of the countless figures who might have shaped his thinking, he chose to share lunch with me.
It was a generous gesture, but it also revealed something important about his worldview. Throughout our conversation, Cosimo consistently emphasised the value of present relationships over distant idols, and of authentic human connection over celebrity or status.
What emerged from Cosimo Cavallaro's Fantasy Cultural Year was not simply a list of destinations, performances, and cultural experiences. It was a portrait of an artist who sees creativity as a vehicle for transformation.
Every stop on the journey, every artistic choice, and every philosophical reflection pointed towards the same underlying belief: that art has the power to help us see differently, think differently, and perhaps even become different. In a world often divided by certainty, Cosimo's cultural year was a celebration of curiosity, vulnerability, and the possibility of human understanding.
Some examples of Cosimo's work:
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Mark Walmsley FRSA FCIM AGSM
Chief Culture Vulture
Arts & Culture Network
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Mark Walmsley FRSA AGSM
Chief Culture Vulture
Arts & Culture Network
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