Museum for Preventive Imagination — EDITORIAL

With Xavier Aballí, Andreas Angelidakis, Archivio Storico Birra Peroni, Archivio Marcello Salustri, Pierre Bismuth, Henry Bond, Corita Kent, Gino De Dominicis, Trisha Donnelly, Melvin Edwards, Morgan Fisher, Philipp Fleischmann, Liam Gillick/Henry Bond, Marcia Hafif, i ready made appartengono a tutti ®, Ann Veronica Janssens, Lory D, Marcello Maloberti, Cecilia Mangini, Franco Mazzucchelli, Luigi Nono, Gastone Novelli, Joanna Piotrowska, Emilio Prini, Puppies Puppies, Sarah Rapson, Roberto Rossellini, Seth Siegelaub, Giovanna Silva, Lewis Stein, Nora Turato, Ufficio per la Immaginazione Preventiva, VIPRA, Luca Vitone, Nicole Wermers, Eduardo Williams & Mariano Blatt.

Edited by Luca Lo Pinto

Ciao!

I’m writing you this letter from Rome, where tomorrow, July 17, I will finally be able to reopen and to unveil the first exhibition of my new programme, under the artistic direction of Luca Lo Pinto.

An editorial introduces the contents of a magazine, a fanzine, a book or a series of publications. It can launch a new project, speak of intentions, foreshadow provocations. It sets out to engage those who will peruse those contents, or take part in those initiatives.

Likewise, the 55 works contained in Museum for Preventive Imagination – EDITORIAL suggest the directions, positions, imaginaries and languages that will be explored in my three-year programme. They are the contents—not yet in a layout—of a future living magazine.

The exhibition will extend through my entire architecture, after a phase of renovation that has been necessarily prolonged by the health emergency. Spreading the content through my 10,000 square metres of space, including areas not usually utilized for exhibitions, I will plunge you into a dimension of rediscovery. A novel way of visiting a museum, which takes on an ulterior sense of re-appropriation, in the light of the transformations the pandemic has imposed on our experience of works of art and the spaces of their display.

I will guide you along a pathway through the museum institution and its identity—physical and conceptual—with multiple interventions, some of which have been commissioned for the occasion, or have never been shown before.

The selection of artists indicates the wide range of personalities I will be hosting, placing various disciplines on the same level, including cinema, music and poetry, while revealing a system of unexpected connections in their gaps and interspaces, making room for many irregular figures that elude conventional formats and definitions.

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. They reveal a stratified, diachronic overview of my architecture, storerooms, memory, and of my city. They unveil imaginaries, suggesting reflections on the urgent themes of the contemporary world, reiterating the timeliness of their thinking, also in the case of personalities of the past, some of whom have been all but forgotten today. Together, they address the idea of the museum itself in relation to its audiences, amplifying a dimension of questioning that challenges models, stimulating an experiment of redefinition of the museum’s identity.

To amplify this polyphony of voices, I have asked a series of writers to translate their visit to the exhibition into words, offering their own interpretations, channelled into a new narrative and imagining further dialogues. These stories will be gathered in a book without images, where the exhibition is documented only by the texts written by these authors.

This editorial marks the beginning of my programme, which will evolve in an organic way as a single, large exhibition, until the end of 2022. My architecture 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. I will be a device of on-going knowledge production, constantly updated, 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. And I will continue to play my social role, always resetting and restarting from the relationship with artists and their thinking.

I look forward to seeing you.
Museum for Preventive Imagination

P.S. I would like to remind you that the entry is free and that due to the current regulations for social distancing a reservation is required.

I’ll be happy to respond to any requests for information. Please do not hesitate to contact me or my press office.