Museum MADRE - Project Room' Programme 2009

Project Room' Programme 2009_2010

curated by Adriana Rispoli | Eugenio Viola

26.03.09 | 01.12.10

The programme of the Project Room of the Madre Museum for the year 2009/2010 will be directed by two young Neapolitan curators: Adriana Rispoli/Eugenio Viola. Preceded by the Empathy project by Mariangela Levita, currently in progress, this year it will be divided in three different sections: Transit and Spot, focused on the themes of transit, deterritorialization and dislocation.
TRANSIT is a reflection on the geopolitical position and on the anthropological background of Naples, on the key role the city has always played in what was once called Mare Internum. The network that Transit aims to establish symbolically reopens the ancient Mediterranean routes; it starts from the past of places to reflect on their present and on their delicate social and environmental balances, on history with its legacy of war and rifts; it investigates the complexity and the stratifications of what we could call “palimpsest cities”, borrowing an expression from Georg Simmel.
Cairo, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, and Thessaloniki are the cities chosen this year for a twinning with Naples. They are all different from each other, but they have in common their character of threshold cities, transit places whose physical and cultural bowels are always inhabited by new conflicts and new contradictions.
Transit aims at connecting young Neapolitan artists with young artists coming from these cities of the Middle East basin, all of them “eccentric” - in the etymological sense of the word - to the big capitals of the art system. The project involves selected curators and institutions from these cities, and proposes a series of two-persons shows (1 Neapolitan artist – 1 foreign artist) held in two different venues: a site-specific project in the Project Room of Madre, and a second exhibition in a museum of the city of origin of the foreign artist.
SPOT is a project consisting in a series of exhibitions held alternatively with the exhibitions of the Transit project dedicated to young Neapolitan artists at their first exhibition experience. SPOT has been conceived to put the spotlights, for short periods of time, on a transversal scenario that is still unknown to the most, and to promote a greater osmosis between the museum and the territory, in line with the mission of the Project Room, which is increasingly shaping up as an experimental laboratory of ideas, proposals and projectual hypotheses.