Special Projects

MACRO: SPECIAL PROJECTS July 2009 MACRO Via Reggio Emilia, 54 00198 Roma http://www.macro.roma.museum Join us on Facebook Macro announces the first two special installations for its challenging spaces: Francesco Simeti’s Pastiche, and Cuoghi Corsello’s Exquisite Corpses. These works, explicitly commissioned by MACRO, are meant to give a new skin to the museum’s re-awakening body. On July 15 the new Director of MACRO, Luca Massimo Barbero, introduced the beginning of a series of special projects, which will occupy the Museum’s previously neglected and forgotten spaces. MACRO is inviting young Italian and International artists to produce original works in order to transform the conformation, the atmosphere, and the visual aspect of the museum. The series starts with the installations of Francesco Simeti for the halls’ curve walls, and of the duo Cuoghi Corsello for the walls behind the glass elevators. Francesco Simeti has printed his work Pastiche into 2 big PVC industrial sheets, and installed them on the curve walls of the museum’s halls. The work presents at first decorative natural motifs, typical of wallpapers, among which, as through a sort of visual trick, dramatic images of hurricanes and natural calamities appear. This postmodern idea of “pastiche” creates a feeling of shock and estrangement, and makes the spectator reflect on the violent power of nature and its idealized and reassuring representations. Francesco Simeti (Palermo, 1968) is an internationally acclaimed artist. Among his many solo exhibitions are No place Like Home (2007) at Francesca Minini gallery in Milan, and Now I Know My ABC’s (2003) at Esso Gallery in New York. He also showed for museum spaces, like at the fifteenth Rome Quadriennale (Palazzo delle Esposizioni), and won various awards and projects. Recently, he inaugurated with one of his works the preparation of Palazzo Belmonte Riso’s façade. The duo Cuoghi Corsello, fathers of the street-art and irreverent members of the alternative Italian scene, presents Cadaveri Squisiti: a light installation on the gigantic vertical space visible only from the museum’s elevator. Fifteen neon lights portray six humorous and ironic characters, typical of the artist duo: Bello, Suf, Un Maiale, Quadrupede, Pea Brain e Petronilla, and create a quasi-dada story that develops through the previously uninhabited museum’s spaces, and lead the visitors through the building’s levels. Monica Cuoghi (Mantova, 1965) and Claudio Corsello (Bologna, 1964) met at the Clementina Art Academy in Bologna; in 1989 they started working together under the “Cuoghi Corsello” name, and shortly after become leaders of the Bologna alternative scene. Since the beginnig, they have been experimenting with graffiti, music, video, lights and electro-mechanics. Between 1994 and 2006 the duo occupied big abandoned spaces, like former factories, in order to “dedicate any moment of our life to our passion, and transform the surrounding environment into a work of art that would represent us.” Coughi and Corsello recently took part in a seminar at Stabilimento Teseco, which was dedicated to the various forms of street-art.