MACRO: Perspectives of a specific museum model 

Between 2002 and 2008, I curated a series of initiatives as a curator for special projects at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, among which were four solo exhibitions in Belgrade realised in collaboration with the Italian Embassy and Casa Italia - Italian Cultural Institute. 
Thanks to His Excellency, Ambassador Alessandro Merola's interest in contemporary art and cultural cooperation, we realised presentations of Italian artists who had solo exhibitions at MACRO. Thus, the title “Perspectives of a specific museum model” indicated that, in its early years, under the direction of Danilo Eccher, MACRO mainly organised solo exhibitions, either retrospectives or special presentations of emerging artists. 
For the presentation of Italian artists in Belgrade, I, as a curator and MACRO, as an institution, presented a project specially conceived for Belgrade, designed in accordance with the museum's programme guidelines. This proposal presented not fragments of the Italian art scene, but a selection of Italian artists in accordance with a precise museum model, built and articulated through two complementary modes of institutional activity: on the one hand, the “retrospective model”, based on the historical elaboration of an artist's oeuvre, and on the other, the “project model”, which highlights the role of the museum as an active agent involved in the production of culture in the present day. Through this project, MACRO sought to synthesise the guidelines that underpin its programme structure and characterise it as a museum not only oriented towards the elaboration of historical artistic paths, but also as a space where current events and future perspectives converge. 
The project began with a major exhibition of Nunzio at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and was further developed through a series of residency-based projects that enabled three female artists, Sara Ciracì, Sissi, and Stefania Galegati, to present site-specific works at than newly opened Italian Cultural Institute - Casa Italia. 

2007

SISSI: I AM ATTACHED TO THE ART OF MAKING THINGS; I FIND IT NECESSARY FOR MY HAPPINESS TO CREATE MY WORKS MANUALLY AND PERSONALLY

‘…I am attached to the art of making things; I find it necessary for my happiness to create my works manually and personally.’ 
The artist's words confirm what fascinates us from the very first encounter with her work: a world in which reality gives way to imagination, to a fantastical dimension in which she herself is often the protagonist, appearing as a figure from distant mythological and fairy-tale lands. 
With her presence, with her own body, she animates this world, born of a long and meditative process in which making, weaving threads, creating meshes and textures with her own hands means marking time to the rhythm of her own being. So this temporal cadence alludes to that which we find in nature, to its tireless process of transformation and renewal, to its sprouting and changing, creating and changing, just as the figure of the artist changes through the multitude of identities she assumes in the play of reflections dictated by her imagination. 
Sissi's work spans various fields of expression, starting with live performances and actions, which are translated into photography and video, and then also into sculptural and environmental interventions, which always take on the status of autonomous works. Thus, the work presented in the show, “Secondo mezzo-piano” (Second Half-Floor), which began as an action involving the body, and therefore as a performance requiring the presence of the artist herself, evolves according to a process that appears to be a constant in her work, and so the artist subsequently “abandons” the “nest”, in this case the “shell” made of pink knitwear, which now remains an integral part of the sculptural environment, of an imaginary secret room that preserves the traces of her presence and invites us to pick up the threads of the story the artist wishes to tell. 
It is a story that runs through all her work, continuously dealing with the theme of the body and its many transformations. Still, the theme of life itself, understood as inner life, which crosses the boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious, and, on the other hand, in a more tactile, physical, and organic sense.
Often starting with what appears to be inert, synthetic, and artificial material, Sissi transforms it so that it seems to acquire different connotations and take on completely unexpected forms that metaphorically project it into the natural world. 
“Natura” (Nature) is the title of one of her recent performances, which also inspired the collages and drawings presented in this exhibition under the title “Luoghi di approdo” (Places of Landing). 
For Sissi, these places are fragments of imaginary landscapes, rocky formations, cliffs, and sharp and solid surfaces that could, almost like a bone structure, serve as points of support or anchorage. 
Just like the body, these are also metaphorical transpositions of a “place”, an imaginary “dwelling”, a fixed point where life thrives, where nature, as the artist emphasises, understood as the nature of being, moves according to its own instinctive pulsations.

BACK