Every morning in the sky on the coast between Ladispoli and Anzio

 All I do is make things and present them. Art presents a reality. Art doesn’t present a metaphor. The conversation with society is not: what is the function of art?  The conversation with society is: what do people do with this stuff that other people make? What do people do with the idea that there are human beings making things and placing them in the world and that those things are just means for other people to understand their relationship to the world?
Lawrence Weiner

For the summer of 2020 MACRO presents TRACCE / TRACES, an exhibition by Lawrence Weiner produced by the museum with the aim of getting out of conventional spaces and looking to the sky, thanks to a series of aerial banners along the coast, from Ladispoli to Anzio.

The exhibition, devised by Luca Lo Pinto, links back to the book of the same title produced in 1970 for Galleria Sperone, edited by Germano Celant, which focused on translation. The project envisioned by Weiner shortly after Celant’s death is also a tribute to the late Italian curator.

Exactly fifty years after the release of the publication, the artist has selected ten of the fifty works included in the book. They all consist of a single word, corresponding to the past participle of a verb that suggests an action that could have happened in the past, or could be expected for the future. The verbs, isolated and removed from any syntactic context, lend themselves to open interpretation.

From 16 to 25 August, along the coastline most popular with Romans, the exhibition will present a different work each day. Though in the past there have been individual works made with airplane condensation trails (Marinus Boezem, Maurizio Nannucci and Bruce Nauman), TRACCE / TRACES is the first solo show by an artist ever presented in the sky.

The project stems from the desire to explore the boundaries and potentialities of the exhibition as a medium — a foundation theme of the programme of Museum for Preventive Imagination — in a moment when it seems even more urgent to think about the ability of a museum to open itself to public space, contributing to its reformulation. The exhibition will allow thousands of people to take part in a unique and totally ephemeral collective experience, offering each viewer the possibility — unexpected, for most — of coming into contact with works of art outside the context in which they are usually displayed and observed.

Lawrence Weiner (1942) is one of the leading figures of the contemporary art avant-garde, as well as one of the foremost Conceptual artists who has contributed to redefine the paradigms of the work of art, its production and distribution. For Weiner, art can exist as a mere declaration of intent, as well as in its concrete realization.

In 1968 he stated:

As a result, his sculptures manifest themselves in the widest variety of forms. The medium of his works are listed as LANGUAGE + THE MATERIAL REFERRED TO. Lawrence Weiner’s works can be seen on the walls of leading international museums, on the facades of buildings, on street pavements and in other public spaces around the world, as well as in countless books, posters, records and other types of media.

An artist’s book will be produced for the occasion, thus completing an ideal circuit.