MACRO re-opens. A Museum for Preventive Imagination

Artists apparently distant from each other in terms of generation, background and language question the status of the artwork and its capacity to narrate and resonate with the complexity of the present. Museum for Preventive Imagination is going to start and evolve in an organic way as a single, large exhibition, opened until the end of 2022. The architecture of MACRO will thus become the template of a layout open to heterogeneous contents, to offer visitors not just exhibitions, but also columns and formats to browse through in a fluid way. This constantly updated knowledge production device is based on the idea of a location that is free of charge, to which to return again and again, developing your own paths of interpretation, not necessarily paced by events and openings. 

Under the title Museum for Preventive Imagination – Editorial, the first exhibition in the programme of MACRO, under the artistic direction of Luca Lo Pinto, an editorial introduces the contents of a magazine or a series of publications. Likewise, the fifty-five works included in the exhibition suggest directions, positions and languages of the three-year programme of Museum for Preventive Imagination. They are the contents of a further, dynamic magazine. Luca Lo Pinto here reveals few details about his programmatic intents.

Could you please explain which typology of artist' selection you operated and which kind of dialogue did you establish with them, in this delayed period?
The exhibition was in the process of opening shortly after the pandemic exploded, so the dialogue with the artists was maintained but it did not influence the choices or the production of the artworks themselves. The show, like the project of the museum, was already conceived with the idea of “preventive imagination” which, during the confinement, became topical to everyone. The exhibition is a landscape with different moments of intensity amplified by the works, documents, images, tracks and works seeking to animate the space and the mind of whoever observes it. 

Which kind of poetic declaration this exhibition represents?
It is not so much a declaration as an exploration which interrogates the museum as a coercive space rather than a space of freedom. It is an exhibition that wants to suggest an idea of anti-museum where the contents dictate its meaning, where it is the voice of the artists that imposes itself, rather than that of the institution. It brings together artists from distant languages and worlds (from Corita Kent to Lory D, from Marcia Hafif to Sarah Rapson to Luigi Nono and Roberto Rossellini) to present the spaces of the MACRO before being laid out in the various columns that will animate them from December onwards. I will use all the architecture, even the less functional and interstitial parts, with works which do not attack, but rather whisper, their presence. It’s a project which seeks to transmit the sense of what is to come, a manifesto of intentions which praises a crossing of disciplines and the overcoming of the idea of the exhibition as a static body, welcoming instead the model of the continuous laboratory.