Today it happens more and more rarely, but once upon a time the road was the safe place where everyone felt safe, where anything could be done because nothing bad would ever happen. The children grew up on the street, played there and there they had their first experience of the world. Then the world itself changed, people's perceptions of him changed. This rhetoric is probably still valid today in some more intimate centres, but less so in the city.
In Rome, however, the MAXXI Museum relaunches the street – understood as a place of interaction between public and private and a tool for the regeneration of urban space – in the exhibition entitled La strada. Where the world is created, considering it as a place of sharing and innovation, the main laboratory for artists, architects and creatives. The review will be in Rome until 28 April 2019 and was curated by Hou Hanru with the collaboration of the MAXXI curatorial team.
More than 140 artists and over 200 works have been called together to compose the multicultural, polyglot, colorful, frightening, stimulating, deafening story of the streets around the world, the truly great laboratory of discussion, creation, comparison, where the contemporary era is invented. It's about a multimedia exhibition where commonly understood works of art follow one another after architectural projects, photographs, performances, site specific interventions and videos, all capable of welcoming the visitor in a succession of galleries that form a road dozens and dozens of meters long.
A path organized by theme – public actions, daily life, politics, the community, innovation, the role of the institution – essential for understanding the new functions and identities of the contemporary street. The spaces of the museum are transformed into open spaces in which artistic interventions reveal critical and alternative uses of urban space, conceived as a place where new methods of artistic creation, political manifestation, technological innovation and sharing of common spaces are activated. Starting from the belief that it is the place where the world is created, space is analyzed as a manifesto of contemporary life, a scenario and a privileged point of view of everyday experience, a landscape in which the creative community and the citizen community give life to a new community and a new world of urban creativity.
The road is analyzed as ever-changing manifesto of contemporary life, an element of connection but also of rupture, the setting for everyday experiences such as street festivals, impromptu cinemas or street food.
By offering their actions and reflections to the communities that inhabit the street and inviting them to participate actively, the artists have incited the community to reflect on the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of urban life. This has transformed the street into a new intellectual, social and political battlefield: a laboratory for the exercise of civic freedom, a battleground between technological development and resistance to the invasion of privacy, the scene of innovative and creative projects dedicated to key themes such as the economic, urban and political crisis, social justice, new ways of inhabiting space, working and generating exchanges and climate-environmental issues.
The sections of the exhibition focus attention on a few key issues for understanding the new functions and multiple identities of the street in the contemporary world: historical analysis of theoretical and design proposals (Mapping), public actions (Interventions), political activism (Street Politics), everyday life (Everyday Life), technological innovation (Good Design), the community (Community), the role of the institution (Open Institutions).
As can be read in the presentation sheet of the exhibition, the street, the place where the world is created, is a constantly changing manifesto of contemporary life, at the same time element of connection and theater of clashes, a privileged point of view from which to observe and recover the experience of everyday life.
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