MUSEUM FOR PREVENTIVE IMAGINATION

Museum for Preventive Imagination is the title of the program envisioned from 2020 by the Artistic Director of MACRO — Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Luca Lo Pinto: a single exhibition project that will evolve organically until the end of 2024. 

The title is inspired by the project “Bureau for Preventive Imagination” (Ufficio per l’Immaginazione Preventiva), established in 1973 by Carlo Maurizio Benveduti, Tullio Catalano and Franco Falasca. The project aimed to produce an art capable of revolutionising society, serving as a manifesto for the museum’s attitude and identity. Without overlooking the origins and development of the museum as an institution, it is necessary to try and free it from models that are anachronistic to the complexity and porosity of contemporary artistic language. We are living in a historical moment in which the concept of the museum and its identity are constantly challenged by social and economic changes, as well as by the language of art itself. For this reason, it has become essential to experiment with alternative models. 

Museum for Preventive Imagination transforms the museum into a performative space: a stage in which events, exhibitions, and projects with different spatial and temporal dimensions coexist, and aim to involve the public with a program that is both accessible and entertaining, understandable but not didactic. The museum becomes a shared infrastructure, a space for reciprocity, conviviality, and the questioning of the role of artistic production and its reception. The idea is to develop an elastic and interdisciplinary museum structure that focuses on artists and their thinking, a museum as a study of imaginative forms of cultural production as opposed to a static exhibition space. 

Museum for Preventive Imagination is conceived as an exhibition project articulated over a five-year span, aspiring to evolve in an organic way on various levels. In this regard, MACRO is not a space for hosting several shows of a certain duration, but rather an exhibition project with a single duration — outlined as a puzzle destined to be completed gradually. Consequently, instead of hosting exhibitions, the museum itself turns into an exhibition, intended as a form and place of production. A container that becomes content — aiming to reduce the distance between the dichotomies of the museum as actor and public as spectator. 

The project is articulated by imagining the museum as a three-dimensional magazine, developed around themes and formats that will function as columns to accommodate heterogeneous content. The different sections (Solo/Multi; Polyphony; Arrhythmics; In-Design; Bibliographic Office; Chamber Music; Rehearsal; Retrofuture. Notes for a Collection) are designed to produce an experience of the museum that is both fragmented and totalising — a polyphonic cultural centre that translates an editorial structure into a living organism.