From 7 December to 28 April 2019
Curated by Hou Hanru
Over 200 works by more than 140 artists to describe a space that is not only a fundamental infrastructure built by man, but a place crossed by multiple meanings, sometimes the victim of visual and physical bombardments - signs, advertisements, surveillance cameras, garbage - territory of experimentation of sharing practices and new technologies, showcase of projects born from the needs of the communities that live there.
With LA STRADA , MAXXI becomes a street-museum, capable of combining works, actions, events and artistic, architectural, urban planning and technological research, conceived by an international creative community, expanding the research conducted already in 2017 for the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture of Shenzhen with which the museum has collaborated, on the most iconic artistic experiences that have reinterpreted the functions and identities of the street in the last twenty years. In this way the museum becomes the spokesperson for a reflection on the future of urban life and civil society, and on the function of artistic and cultural institutions.
Site-specific projects, performances and transdisciplinary events are part of a path organized by themes - public actions, daily life, politics, community, innovation, the role of the institution - fundamental for understanding the new functions and identities of the contemporary street. Starting from the conviction that this space is the place where the world is created, it is analyzed as a manifesto of contemporary life, a privileged scenario and point of view of the experience of everyday life, a landscape in which the creative community and the city give life to a new community and a new world of urban creativity.
STREET POLITICS (Resistance, Protest, Occupy, Manifest, Feminism and the Carnevalesque ...) is the main theme of the first part of the exhibition, in which the street is described not only as a place for celebrations and parties, but also as a space where a voice is given to social tensions, an arena of protest and resistance to power control.
A fundamental role in the whole exhibition is attributed to the medium of video, the channel through which we look at the world today, an ideal vehicle for narration and at the same time a device for the creation of space, a tool for mapping and reorganizing the urban environment. , the main interface between public and private. Among those related to the theme of the protest Walked The Way Home by Eric Baudelaire, Angry Sandwich People by Chto Delat and O Levante The Uprising by Jonathas de Andrade. The core GOOD DESIGN (Innovation, Limitation and Freedom) includes works that paint the road as an ideal platform in which to experiment with technological innovations related to communication, life, mobility. On the street, approaches and knowledge have been shared that have made possible not only a new form of design but also new conditions of environmental and social sustainability.
The COMMUNITY (Immigration, Minorities, Diversity, Love and Living Together) theme brings together works in which the road is the fundamental node for the development of a shared conscience, the laboratory in which to redefine the boundaries and characters of minorities, or - in the light of recent migratory phenomena - rethinking the means of reception and protection. Around the theme EVERYDAY LIFE (Eat, Work and Exchange, Home / Homeless…) revolve not only works that express all this, but also works that underline how life on the street can take on the character of marginalization and social exclusion.
Around the theme INTERVENTIONS (Walk, Play and Getting lost ...) revolve the video works of over 30 artists, from Allora & Calzadilla to Cao Fei, from Martin Creed to Jean-Baptiste Ganne, from the collective Ha Za Vu Zu to David Hammons and many other; interventions that reveal how, thanks to the experiences of the artists of the Sixties and Seventies, contemporary artists have considered the street as one of the privileged contexts of intervention in which to experiment more ordinary and other more complex actions, up to the investigation of sensation of bewilderment inherent in the urban dimension.
The last theme addressed by the exhibition is MAPPING (Planned / Unplanned, Built / Un-built) which highlights the common characteristics between contemporary artistic research and architectural - urban planning today characterized by vertical projects, elevations, underpasses, futurist or utopian crossings often in contrast with the built space and the urban utopia of the street as an ordering element. This theme is also inevitably linked to the question of the flow of people and goods that find one of the most evident criticalities right in the street.
Via Guido Reni, 4a, Rome, Italy
Opening hours
opens - closes | last entry | |
monday | Closed now | |
tuesday | 11:00 - 19:00 | |
wednesday | 11:00 - 19:00 | |
thursday | 11:00 - 19:00 | |
friday | 11:00 - 19:00 | |
saturday | 11:00 - 20:00 | |
sunday | 11:00 - 20:00 |