ROME.- “Forgetting by heart” is an expression coined towards the end of the 1960s by Vincenzo Agnetti (1926-1981). The title of the group exhibition that concludes the programming of MACRO under the artistic direction of Luca Lo Pinto borrows the phrase to suggest an approach to the results of a project that over a span of five years has led the museum, as an institution, to question its own identity, its own modes of production and relation with artists and the audience.

The museum is reflected in an exhibition spreading throughout its architecture, in an area of over 10,000 square meters. The works are by more than 30 Italian and international artists, including those created for the occasion by Tolia Astakhishvili (featuring Thea Djordjadze, Heike Gallmeier, Dylan Peirce), Maurizio Altieri, Beatrice Bonino, Francesca Cefis and Lukas Wassmann, Pippa Garner, Lenard Giller, Félix González-Torres, Thomas Hutton, KUKII (aka Lafawndah), Rosemary Mayer, Charlemagne Palestine, Lorenzo Silvestri, Gillian Wearing.

The works on view include pieces by historically acclaimed artists like Luciano Fabro, Isa Genzken, Simone Forti, and by some of the most outstanding exponents of the younger art scene, such as Issy Wood, together with the opportunity to come across more rarely seen figures like Pierre Guyotat or Absalon, or others who have brought an artistic perspective to fashion, such as Maurizio Altieri, and to design, including Paolo Pallucco & Mireille Rivier. The overview also focuses on emerging artists like Hamishi Farah and Sandra Mujinga.

Post Scriptum. A museum forgotten by heart is an exhibition that mirrors Editorial, the group show spreading through the entire museum in 2020, launching Lo Pinto’s programming with a statement of intentions and directions. Following the metaphor of a magazine, the project has developed across five years with an editorial structure of eight thematic sections, corresponding to the various rooms of the museum. Some have investigated the idea of the exhibition itself, while others have challenged its conventions, incorporating figures from outside the system and other languages like design, music, publishing: a palimpsest composed of over 60 exhibitions, involving 250 artists, under the title of Museum for Preventive Imagination.

While the concept of the museum is intrinsically linked to the idea of History, the institution itself has been conceived as an exhibition, experimenting with a poetic approach with respect to a linear narrative, avoiding the History of the museum and entering the histories of exhibitions. The project has attempted to propose a different model of the museum that would reflect the spirit of the present day, in which every subject is forced to rethink its way of being in the world.

For its conclusion, in keeping with a precise, coherent curatorial script in a perfectly circular context, the museum returns to its neutral state, with the dismantling of the editorial structure that has defined it in these years, to make room for an exhibition that looks to the past and the present with a future perspective.

The exhibition does not follow a linear narrative, but instead creates an open finale made of unexpected associations, different languages and unprecedented insights (or rarely seen in Italy) into the tradition of institutional critique, absorbing them and returning them to the museum as a living entity in a state of becoming.

In the run-up to the opening of the exhibition, on 5 September MACRO presents Yard by Allan Kaprow, an environment from 1961 that is still the manifesto of an art capable of interacting with existing spaces and social contexts, criticizing the idea of individual power of the artist as opposed to collective action, and rejecting the notion that the work should necessarily aspire to achieve a definitive status.