The Laboratory of the Future
The Academy of Fine Arts as a Building Site for Regenerating Society
In discussing training in the Fine Arts Academies — an ever-thorny issue, which has now become topical again — and possibly also conjugating it with the future, I would like to start out from two facts. One is internal: the increase in the number of students, teachers and lecturers enrolled at these institutions. The other […]
Between Art and Innovation
A Road to Travel
“Future” derives from futurus and from fuo, i.e. “I am”: fui,that which will be, that which is to be. I am, therefore, in a temporal space that projects us forward, into an unpredictable future. This unpredictability is what characterises our current existential condition, especially if we look at it from a broader perspective, the last […]
The History of 21st Century Art in Universities
A Multi-Voice Dialogue on Current Practices and Future Goals
As part of the “Network universitario” project promoted by the Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma since March 2022, we have surveyed current doctoral research projects specifically dedicated to the visual arts in 21st century Italy. As may partly have been expected, the results of this mapping exercise portray a reality that is struggling to open […]
The Museum Ahead of Us
The Present and Future of the Contemporary Art Museum
One of a museum’s most salient characteristics is that it is a valuable tool for understanding our society. To read the history of the museum in a given context is to observe in depth the comings-and-goings of values and the changes that have taken place; what has been — and is — considered so important […]
An Interspecies Perspective for the Survival of Humanity Contemporary Art in the Dialectic between the Natural and the Posthuman
Today, we are seeing a far-reaching spread of practices which explore cross-species relations. This is happening both on the international and the Italian scenes: a response to a perceived imminent catastrophe, in a world where every original balance has been shaken. At the root of the great problems of our time, there seems to be […]
Staring at the Environment
An Existential Theme for Art
It was 1966 when Il ragazzo della via Gluck (The Boy from Via Gluck; the song recorded in English as Tar and Cement)moved to the city “to breathe in the cement” finding, on his return to the countryside, “nothing but houses upon houses, tar and cement”. He couldn’t help but wonder “why they keep building […]
“There Are Other Worlds, but They Are in This One”
The Road as a Centre of Action on the Future
“Environmentalism without class struggle is gardening”Chico MendesBrazilian trade unionist, politician and environmentalist “There are other worlds, but they are in this one”. In her 2002 Golden sentence series the Spanish artist Dora Garcia took up the words of the poet Paul Éluard, one of the major exponents of the Surrealist movement. The year before, the slogan “Another […]
In Front of the Mirror
The Tomorrow already Told in TV Series
«Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem; nunc cognosco ex parte, tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum» — this is St. Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians (I Cor. 13:12), the passage that has tormented thinkers and theologians, writers and poets, with fevers of reason. It is not […]
If Tomorrow Is Fragile
An Exhibition on the Future at the Baths of Diocletian
The younger generations have always been asked to imagine tomorrow. Where the fatigue of a life already partly lived leads to an individual retreat of one’s expectations, the vision of what the future has in store for the community seems, by necessity, the prerogative of a fresh look – a more confident one, perhaps the […]
What Remains
A Conversation on Death
Only one therapy, only one therapyOnly one therapy, only one therapyThey will come on the counterattack with new helmets and weaponsThey will come on the counterattack but meanwhile nowCure me, cure me, cure meCure me, cure me, cure me Curami, by CCCP What follows is a conversation conducted between Milan and Venice. It has no […]
