A palimpsest, where different temporalities overlap with one another to reflect on the role of a public collection of contemporary art in the 21st century. In an age when technical reproduction has achieved previously unimaginable levels, it is useful to question the value and meaning of originality within a collection, and its reception.Read More...
Most of what we use and interpret today does not derive from a direct experience of it but is instead filtered by digital images or videos. From this perspective, public collections represent an interesting case-study: the majority of museums’ collections are shut away in storage rooms inaccessible to visitors, with only a small portion on display. The collection safekept by the MACRO, located below the courtyard of the former Birra Peroni Brewery, is composed of 1200 pieces acquired by the Municipality City of Rome between the 1950s and early 2000s. This represents the most recent portion of the collections of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale, property of the Capitoline Superintendence of Cultural Heritage. While normally inaccessible to the public, the MACRO collection has been re-presented and interpreted by the photographer Giovanna Silva for the Museum for Preventive Imagination. Printed on a large wallpaper, the images of the collections in the storerooms cover the entirety of the walls of the room. They therefore become the backdrop and context for new works by young Italian artists, which have gradually occupy the space over a four-year span — a collection in fieri, that has grown organically with time.
