Making a construction site
Inertia and entropy in the contemporary monument
Gigantic, neoclassical statues loom over London’s cityscape in 2099. Archaic angels, fractured ruins, historical and mythical gods, and heroes comprise the anachronistic imagery we encounter in the TV series The Peripheral, a recent adaptation of William Gibson’s sci-fi novel of the same title. The story is set in two different time periods, one in a […]
Italy, Year Zero
The Street as an Essential Driver of a Generation
In Germany, Year Zero (1948), little Edmund Koehler treads like a stray dog through the streets of a bombed-out Berlin. His steps seem to venture through the ruins of a disused film set. This is surely a paradox, seemingly as far from the poetic universe of neorealism as it gets. There is, in fact, no […]
Beauty Is in the Streets
Changing Prepositions, in Order to Change the World
“La beauté est dans la rue” — so reads the slogan on a famous poster produced during May 1968 in the Atelier Populaire, the creative workshop of the French revolt. The image, which depicts a young woman hurling a cobblestone, echoes Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting Liberty Leading the People, with Marianne on the barricades holding […]
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 […]
