#MAXXI Museum

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Architectural Photography

By Francesca Pompei.

Interiors of the MAXXI Museum built by Zaha Hadid Architects in Rome, Italy with date 2009.

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MAXXI foundation, Roma

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little boy

[conformi]

Fridtjof Nansen, In northern mists: Arctic exploration in early times, 1911 (cover image of volume 2) VS Zaha Hadid, MAXXI: Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome, Italy, 1998-2009 ph. Simone Cecchetti

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Museo Maxxi Roma, 2018

[blueiscoool]

‘Ancient Roman’ Solar Roof Tiles Power Pompeii Villa

Ancient Roman ruins at Pompeii have been fitted with invisible solar panels, in a move that will contribute to the archaeological site’s sustainability efforts and cut costs. The innovative panels, which blend into the background by imitating traditional materials, were installed on the House of Cerere, on a thermopolium — a Roman snack bar — and on the House of the Vettii, which recently reopened following 20 years of restoration work.

“They look exactly like the terracotta tiles used by the Romans, but they produce the electricity that we need to light the frescoes,” said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the archaeological park of Pompeii, in a press release.

Each year, 3.5 million tourists explore the vast ruins of the ancient Roman city, which was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. But due to Pompeii’s size, energy bills are expensive and conventional methods of providing power across the site can threaten its appearance.

“Pompeii is an ancient city which in some spots is fully preserved,” Zuchtriegel said. “Since we needed an extensive lighting system, we could either keep consuming energy, leaving poles and cables around and disfiguring the landscape, or choose to respect it and save millions of euros.” The new technology will help the archaeological site to cut energy bills and make it more enjoyable, he added.

The invisible solar panels — or “traditional PV tiles” as they are technically known — were created by the Italian company Dyaqua. They can be designed to appear like stone, wood, concrete or brick, and hidden on walls, floors and roofs, according to Elisabetta Quagliato, whose family owns Dyaqua, in the press statement.

“We are an archaeological site but we also want to be a real-life lab for sustainability and the valorization of intangible heritage,” Zuchtriegel said. “Our initiative is not merely symbolic. Through the million tourists who visit us every year, we want to send a message to the world: cultural heritage can be managed differently and in a more sustainable way.”

Other locations in Italy using the invisible solar technology are the commune of Vicoforte in Italy and, soon, Rome’s contemporary art museum Maxxi. Public buildings in Evora, Portugal, and Split, Croatia will also install the panels, according to the press statement.

Pompeii’s recent use of these panels is just the beginning, Zuchtriegel said. “From now on, we will be taking this solution into account for all future renovation and restoration projects.”

By Garry Shaw.

[mariacallous]

When Italian Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano resigned over a sex scandal on Sept. 6, Alessandro Giuli was appointed in his place. Giuli had very little experience in politics, but like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in his youth, he was a member of a neofascist party called the Italian Social Movement. Soon after her election, Meloni appointed him as the director of MAXXI, an important museum in Rome.

In a way, Giuli was part of Meloni’s vision years before she appointed him as a minister. She has long considered him one of the most suitable candidates to carry out a project that she cares about: building right-wing cultural hegemony.

Cultural hegemony is a concept developed by Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci to explain why the worker’s revolution that Karl Marx predicted had not yet happened. He theorized that it was because the ruling class controlled social institutions—from schools to the media—and used them to spread its ideologies, shaping the population’s belief system and, thus, its actions. In other words, controlling culture meant controlling political and social outcomes.

Meloni is not a communist, but she is convinced that the Italian left has succeeded, since the end of World War II, in dominating cultural institutions, such as the arts and academia, creating a situation which she has described as “power hegemony” against the right. Now that she’s in power, she’s determined to reverse that imbalance.

Giuli couldn’t agree more—and he’s turning to Gramsci for a road map. In a book that he published in May, aptly titled “Gramsci è vivo” (Gramsci Lives), he outlined his vision: “Today, especially on the right, there’s the mother of all battles: shifting from a mentality of exclusion toward a mentality of System, which means perceiving oneself as a ruling class with a vision, a perspective of society.”

What he was trying to argue in the book is that the right, which until recently was excluded by polite society in general—and more specifically, in the realm of culture—must embrace Gramsci’s vision of cultural hegemony. In other words, to become a true ruling class, you cannot rely on political power alone; you need to establish a dominant narrative to maintain consensus through a system of shared values and take hold of cultural institutions, something that the left has traditionally been better at.

The Italian right’s fascination with Gramsci is not an isolated case: Other European right-wing groups have taken inspiration from the communist philosopher as well. Martin Sellner, an Austrian who is a prominent figure among the German-speaking far right, cited Gramsci in his book Regime Change from the Right: A Strategic Sketch. Among the right-wing admirers of Gramsci outside of Europe, there are former White House strategist Steve Bannon and Olavo de Carvalho, a Brazilian conservative ideologue who died in 2022.

But what sets Meloni apart is that she has both the vision and the power to make it happen.

The first right-wing thinker to appropriate the communist philosopher was the French philosopher Alain de Benoist, who did so in the mid-1970s. According to Francesco Germinario, a historian at the Luigi Micheletti Foundation who specializes in researching the far right, de Benoist decontextualized Gramsci and stripped him of his Marxism, focusing solely on the idea of cultural hegemony and the importance of winning battles on the cultural front to gain power.

This reinterpretation is particularly successful in postwar Italy, where the right—still licking its wounds—found itself marginalized and embraced a defensive, victim mentality: “Since the postwar period, the right has mainly tried to defend itself,” Germinario said.

Then, when Italy’s left underwent an identity crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union, the right found itself in the position to counterattack, but it hadn’t developed the intellectual ammunition. And so, “Lacking its own points of references, the right looked for cultural inspiration from the left,” Germinario added.

To be fair, the perception that the left ever exercised total cultural hegemony in Italy is mostly false. The Christian Democrats, the centrist but socially conservative Catholic party that ruled the country between 1948 and 1992, did hold a strong grip on some cultural institutions, especially schools and television. And the Communist Party maintained a strong influence on book publishing and cinema.

Yet at the same time, right-wing politician Silvio Berlusconi, who ruled as prime minister on and off between 1994 and 2011, notoriously enjoyed a quasi-monopoly over television. Even so, he did not exercise his power on other cultural realms, despite the fact that he owned two major book publishing houses (one of which, Einaudi, leans strongly to the left).

Berlusconi wasn’t interested in high-brow culture and never made a secret of it: “He had an utilitarian conception of culture—he understood ahead of his times the crisis of newspapers and of a world of intellectuals linked to newspapers,” said Giorgio Caravale, professor of modern history at Roma Tre University and the author of the book Senza Intellettuali (Without Intellectuals). “To Berlusconi, it was all about TV,” Caravale added. “He cared more about what showmen were saying in front of the camera than about hundreds of op-eds in newspapers.”

In Italy, television has a central role. After World War II, it contributed to the country’s literacy and spreading Italian (as opposed to regional dialects) as a shared language. Italy has an older population that mostly relies on TV as its main source of information and entertainment. Newspaper and book readership is low, compared to other highly developed nations.

Meloni’s right has a different approach. “When she came to power, she thought: We must do what Berlusconi has not done in 20 years: Invest in culture and take it back from the left,” Caravale said. When she became prime minister in 2022, she allocated most of the cultural positions to trusted people, many of whom had a past in the Italian Social Movement (MSI).

Giuli’s predecessor, Sangiuliano, also came from the MSI. In an interview with the New York Review of Books, he also expressed his intention to overturn what he perceived as a cultural hegemony of the left, saying, “The radical-chic spirit of certain Roman salons tried to transform culture in Italy into something that spoke only to a small circle.” Sangiuliano added that he hoped to give “the national cultural panorama a wider horizon.”

Sangiuliano made a point of weaponizing literature. He has tried to reinterpret Dante Alighieri as an icon of the Italian right and produced a much publicized exhibit in Rome dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien, an author particularly beloved by the post-fascist right in Italy. (Between the 1970s and 1990s, the MSI hosted youth camps called “Campo Hobbit”). He also relished announcing the planned creation of new museums, such as a museum of the Italian language, a museum of the Italian culture, and a “museum of the foibe,” to remember the war crimes of Yugoslav partisans during World War II. None of the museums has actually been built.

Meloni has also appointed another former MSI member, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, to be the president of the Biennale di Venezia—the influential institution that oversees Venice’s glamorous film festival as well as the city’s renowned architecture and art festivals. Buttafuoco is a famous journalist and novelist who is well known for his ultraconservative views.

Meloni’s government has been particularly active in shaping the culture of Italy’s state TV network, or RAI, to the point that in the past few years, it has been dubbed by critics as “Tele-Meloni.” The effort is more aggressive than in Berlusconi’s era and, despite her success, Meloni seems scared that someone might speak badly of her. As a result, the bad news is often censored and the good news celebrated—even if it’s only a pro-Meloni headline in a foreign newspaper.

RAI’s general director, Giampaolo Rossi, is also a former MSI activist, hailing from the same party chapter where Meloni started her political career as a teenager in the Roman neighborhood of Colle Oppio. Under Rossi’s leadership, RAI has produced and aired many historical miniseries, including one glorifying the occupation of the Croatian city of Rijeka by Italian nationalists and another about the last weeks of the fascist regime in 1943.

The moment where Meloni’s grip on RAI became most apparent can be pinpointed. In April, Antonio Scurati, a renowned progressive author best known for writing M,—the monumental, and highly critical, fictionalized biography of Mussolini that has inspired the Sky TV series of the same name—was scheduled to perform a monologue on the anniversary of the country’s liberation from fascism, on April 25. But it was canceled at the last minute—for “editorial reasons,” according to an internal communication from RAI that was leaked to the press—possibly because Scurati’s speech included criticism of Meloni, whom the author accused of belittling the historical significance of anti-fascist resistance.

Meloni’s efforts to establish cultural influence stem not only from ideology, but also out of necessity. As the head of government, Meloni finds herself in the unfortunate position of having to push policies that clash with the wishes of her voters in order to maintain good relations with Europe. In foreign policy, she had to side with Ukraine, despite her base being pro-Russian; on the economy, she had to cut spending on health care and local government funding, a highly unpopular move among her base.

This has put Meloni in a vulnerable position. Unlike Berlusconi, she does not own a media empire that would defend her image no matter what. In this situation, appointing loyalists in key media and cultural positions is necessary to ensure positive coverage.

The fact that Meloni has a clear vision on the need to establish cultural hegemony and is actively pursuing it doesn’t mean that she will succeed. Some critics argue that despite the eagerness, the right’s influence over culture is still thin: “Meloni and the Brothers of Italy [her political party] seem more interested in occupying positions of power than in creating a real cultural hegemony,” said Mario Ricciardi, a columnist for the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto.

Meloni’s policies have been often described as right-wing at home and moderate in the international arena. Domestically, she has passed a law that cracks down on protest and strikes, but her foreign policy has been friendly toward the United States and the EU.

When it comes to ideology, she’s hard to pin down: While she has voiced some fascination with nostalgic, identitarian ideas—such as clear gender roles and the Christian roots of European culture—she can hardly be described as a Russian President Vladimir Putin or a Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Ricciardi argued that Meloni has, for the moment, failed to build a coherent worldview: “She has a clear idea of who are the enemies—the left and the so-called radical chic; she is attached to the idea of a motherland; but besides this, it’s all too vague to even try to appeal to citizens.”

To push an ideology, Ricciardi said, you first need to build one: “Eventually, to have a consensus, you have to put down roots.”

[lienisstienis]

crochet dress in maxxi museum

[erinmartin35]

📍Rome, Italy

Landed in Rome yesterday afternoon and have had fun exploring the city. Yesterday we visited the Colosseum and viewed the Roman Forum from above. Today we went to the National Museum of Rome - Baths of Diocletian, explored Trastevere, went to Auditorium Parco della Musica and the MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art.

It has been a great experience so far in Italy and I am looking forward to exploring more of Rome tomorrow and then Florence and Milan later in the trip! 🇮🇹

As for food I have had excellent pizza, pasta, gelato, red wine and even shots of limoncello.

[valkyries-things]

DAME GIOVANNA MELANDRI // POLITICIAN

“She is an Italian-American politician. She was an MP in the Italian Parliament for 18 years (1994–2012), holding the positions of Minister of Culture (1998–2001) and Minister of Youth and Sport (2006–2008). She was the president of MAXXI, the National Museum of the 21st Century Arts of Rome, until November 1st 2022. She is currently the chairwoman of the Human Foundation.”

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Zaha Hadid by Allison Adams

Dame Zaha Hadid (1950-2016) was an Iraqi-born British architect, known for her radical Deconstructivist designs. In 2004 she became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest honor of her field. In the early days of her career, she became known as a “paper architect,” meaning her designs were too avant-garde to move beyond the sketch phase and actually be built. This impression of her was heightened when her beautifully rendered designs—often in the form of exquisitely detailed colored paintings—were exhibited as works of art in major museums. Her major built works include the London’s Millennium Dome, the London Aquatics Centre (built for the 2012 Olympics) Michigan State University's Broad Art Museum in the US, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, and the Beijing Daxing International Airport in China. She was referred to as the "Queen of the curve", who "liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity".

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OMG thank you I’m just so overwhelmed because there’s so much to see and eat and do in Italy.

Like I can’t even make it to Florence cinque tere or Venice on this trip.

I would loveeeee specific recs for Rome😭

ugh I know I feel like I could live a whole year in Italy and still wouldn't be enough

museums in Rome I recommend:

for Roman/ancient stuff: Trajan's Market, Baths of Diocletian/Caracalla, Palazzo Massimo,

for Modern stuff: Museum of Modern Art and the MAXXI, Palazzo Barberini

just beautiful architecture: Villa Farnesina, Tempietto, Chiostro di Bramante

Churches: Basilica of St. Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Basilica di Santo Stefano Rotondo

for shopping the area around Piazza del Popolo is really good, but the restaurants there a bit pricier. If you go to St. Peter's and you exit the square along the main road and you keep going straight and cross the piazza there's some really nice restaurants there and this tiramisu place tucked in a corner that is divineeee.

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maxxi

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Aleksandra Kasuba (1923-2019) Lithuania / USA

Spectral Passage (1975)

the Lithuanian artist Aleksandra Kasuba created Spectral Passage (1975), a magical, almost hallucinatory sequence of voluptuous, rainbow-tinted nylon structures that fill the long hall beyond the first room at Haus der Kunst. There is something Alice-in-Wonderland-esque about moving from one rainbow-hued nylon vessel to the next. I found the experience even more enjoyable from the outside, as the tinted forms create luscious layers and blends of colour and form as you follow their contours. Kasuba created this work for The Rainbow Show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, which explored the symbolism and significance of the rainbow in ancient mythologies and modern art. I am not sure how the work would take you on a “metaphysical path from birth to death and rebirth”, as the caption promises, or how it relates to Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite, different movements of which are played softly inside each segment. But it certainly consolidated Kasuba’s reputation in the US, to which she had moved in 1947. She was a key figure in the environmental art movement, exhibiting her first such work, Contemplation Environment (1969), for the 1969-70 show at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, and turning her Manhattan apartment into a live art environment with Live-In Environment, between 1971 and 1972.

The last, violet segment in the room sequence in the current show pivots sideways and deposits us in a history room, where several screens reveal something about the extraordinary deep dive that this show entailed. There is a video of Kasuba’s work being constructed, and there is a timeline, born of the research Lissoni, Pugliese and many colleagues conducted, revealing – true to their word – the dominance of female artists shaping this field. As it scrolls along all the key exhibitions between the 1950s and 70s, there are familiar male names: Dan Flavin, Fontana, Andy Warhol, James Turrell, Terry Riley, Robert Morris and Robert Rauschenberg. But there are many more women: Marta Minujín, Carla Accardi, Judy Chicago, Nanda Vigo, Lygia Clark, Laura Grisi, Tania Mouraud, Maria Nordman and Faith Wilding, all of whom appear in this show. Lissoni did not want this to be seen as a “tokenistic” show because it is all women, but because they genuinely were the ones making the groundbreaking work, and he is absolutely right. studiointernational.com

exhibited: MAXXI, Rome

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Ruins and Shelters

*Is there any genuine difference, in the long run? Maybe in Italy, which has had more long-run than most places.

via e-flux.

Demanio Marittimo.KM-278 is the marathon dedicated to architecture, arts, design and to the Adriatic dimension curated by Cristiana Colli and Pippo Ciorra. As every year, the XIV Edition takes place on a public beach in Marzocca di Senigallia on Friday, July 19, no stop from 6pm to 6am.

RUINS&SHELTERS is the theme of this year. On the one hand, it focuses on the accelerated production of ruins produced by wars, conflicts and catastrophes. On the other hand, it reminds us the need to find different forms of shelter/protection for increasingly fragile communities and individuals. 

The setting for the event is the result of a students’ competition hosted by SAAD, School of Architecture University of Camerino. Winning team for the OLTRE project are Fatijon Ademaj, Michele Forti, Qendron Mema, Gloria Seri, Elisa Valori.

Demanio opens with a tribute to this year’s Master of Territory, Guido Guidi. His work will be discussed with Simona Antonacci,Carlo Birrozzi and Antonello Frongia. Paolo Volponi’s 100 Years anniversary will be celebrated by lectures held by Massimo Raffaeli, Aldo Bonomi and Giovanni Russo, curator of an exhibition organized at the Ducal Palace of Urbino. 

An interdisciplinary focus will be dedicated to Kosovo with the curator and critic Alex Fisher, the Mayor of Pristina, Perparim Rama, the curators of Hangar e Autostrada Biennale Leutrim Fishekqiu and Vatra Abrashi, the artists Sislej Xhafa, Artan Hajrullahu, Blerta Hashani. 

Another experience in the field of cultural heritagewill be discussed by Andrea Viliani, Director of the Museum of Civilizations in Rome and curator of the international program Pompeii Commitment, and Davide Quadrio, Director of MAO (Museum of Oriental Art) in Turin.

RUINS&SHELTERS is also a concept that brings us to the fragile centrality of the Living Being, ethical and self-reflective when it comes to humans, “natural” for non-human beings. Sociologist and writer Marco Dotti will discuss the subject with architectural historian Francesco Benelli and composer David Monacchi.

2024 commemorates 150 years since the birth of Guglielmo Marconi. It was from the Colle dei Cappuccini in Ancona that on August 7, 1904 he initiated the legendary “radio” connection with Poldhu in Cornwall, 1750 kilometers away. Marconi’s legacy between will be the focus of the reflections of technological philosopher Cosimo Accoto with Andrea Borgnino and the artist Giovanni Gaggia.

The New York-based firm Lot-Ek will lecture about their work and offer a preview of the film dedicated to them by the director Tom Piper. Artists, designers, filmmakers will be oon stage. Gustav Düsing will talk about his award-winning project for the University of Braunschweig, introduced by Anna Sala of MVDR Foundation. Pietro Martino Federico Pizzi will present the Ceresè winery project, best building of the year, together with Grazzini, Tonazzini, Colombo, designers of the “Quintessenza” installation for the MAXXI. They will be introduced by Lorenza Baroncelli, director of MAXXI Architettura. 

Many installations, artworks, and public design experiments will be exhibited. A Villa Medici fellow artist, Alix Boillot, will present her work Grace. HPO, the Ferrara collective of young architects, will present the TTT installation. The London based collective Lemonot will present Talamo, a project created by the Marche company Noctis and produced by BASE for the last Milan Design Week, introduced by  Linda Di Pietro, director of BASE, and Lorenzo Petri. 

The frontiers of design will be explored by We are the Others (2024, 55 min), a film by Maria Cristina Didero and Francesca Molteni dedicated to the 40 years of activity of the Brazilian brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana. After the viewing, the authors will meet with Marva Griffin. Three shorter films, produced by the LINA fellows Ewa Effron, Laura Hurley, George Guedani in the frame of the MAXXI Architecture Film Lab will be introduced by the authors. 

The event is promoted by MAPPE magazine, Gagliardini Editore, Associazione Demanio Marittimo.Km-278 with the collaboration of MAXXI, the Municipality of Senigallia, the Marche Region and with the support of a wide network of businesses, institutions and associations.