Extraordinary Visions. L’Italia ci Guarda
40 masters of photography and 150 images recounting the Belpaese Beauty, contradictions and a look to the future.
From 2nd June to 23rd October 2016.
The exhibition layout presents four sections (Art, architecture, culture; Res Publica; Paesaggi contemporanei; Comunità, Lavoro), enriched by videos and photo projections and by the special project Inside Out by JR, installed in the museum piazza.
Arte architettura, cultura
The exhibition opens with representations of the worlds of art, architecture,culture and fashion that underlie our national identity. The portraits of the artist of the Venice Biennale by Ugo Mulas and the photographs of Massimo Piersanti contained in the Graziella Lonardi Buontempo archive dialogue with architectural masterpieces photographed by greats such as Gabriele Basilico with the GIL building by Luigi Moretti in Rome. The constructions of the Foro Italico act as a backdrop to the fashion portraits of Giovanni Gastel that celebrate the Made in Italy phenomenon, while the images by Ferdinando Scianna, realised for the first Dolce & Gabbana advertising campaign integrated anthropological research and fashion photography.
Res pubblica
This section includes the work by Armin Linke, Il Corpo dello Stato, in which the artist investigates the "secret” rooms of power, the physical places in which decision making power is exercised. In this reflection on public space and its use, Sicily stands as a mirror of the contradictions that are rife throughout the peninsular: the photographs of ecological protest by Letizia Battaglia confront the new forms of a mafia that is part of the system, insinuated in the municipalities, as testified by the project Corpi di reato by Alessandro Imbriaco, Tommaso Buonaventura and Fabio Severo, photographic documentation of the residences of members of mafia organizations found throughout Italy.
Paesaggi contemporanei
Sicily and Italy in general express a sublime, signified, pacific physicality. Certainly an image established in the collective imagination and frequently stereotypical. The gaze of a historic generation of photographers has focused on the relationship between this image and the post-modern
panorama that has redefined the suburbs of our cities and above all from the 1980s onwards they have devoted themselves to rewriting the image of Italy: Luigi Ghirri, Mario Cresci, Guido Guidi. Another, equally intense, interpretation is that of Franco Fontana who offers an alienating and ecstatic vision of those landscapes.
Comunità, lavoro
From the landscape to the body, in a return to man as the central element and the activator of forces and intellectual and productive energies. In the final section of the exhibition, the world of work is recounted in the historical testimony of Tano D’Amico and Paola Agosti (the strikes, the sit-ins, female labour), from the images of refineries by Paolo Pellegrin to the more recent images of public competitions documented by Michele Borzoni. In each section, a focus is dedicated to new horizons, to the research that is contaminating the idioms of video and photography. These include the installation by Petra Noordkamp dedicated to Gibellina, in which video shooting is treated like the static image of photography; the installation by Alterazioni video dedictaed to the unfinished architecture of Sicily; the "fast forward" to which Olivo Barbieri subjects the almost 8,000 images of La città perfetta; the video on the issue of immigration by the reporter Francesco Zirzola.
Inside Out by JR at MAXXI: Costruiamo la comunità del XXI secolo
Lastly, the work Costruiamo la comunità del XXI secolo (Let’s build the community of 21st century), curated by the museum’s Education Department, with which MAXXI is participating in the project Inside Out by JR (a photo-paster of French origins and unconfirmed identity, winner of the TED Prize 2011). On the basis of a workshop with pupils from the Guido Alessi school in Rome held in April (during which the pupils visited MAXXI and expressed their emotions which were “fixed” in black and white portraits) a large collective art work was created, a kaleidoscope of 250 portraits of the students that will be exhibited on an outside wall of MAXXI, offering a view of the multi-ethnic Italy of tomorrow.
