THE INDEPENDENT. NUMERO CROMATICO. SUPERSTIMOLO

A project room conceived to show the public not only works of art but also a particular approach to artistic research.

The title Superstimolo is born out of the eponymous concept theorized by the ethologist and Nobel Prize winner Nikolaas Tinbergen in 1948. Indeed, Tinbergen’s “supernormal stimulus” is an artificial stimulus, quantitatively or qualitatively strengthened with respect to its natural state, causing more intense instinctive reactions. Starting from this premise, the project seeks to corroborate the hypothesis that art itself can be defined as something that activates the visitor in ways that are more complex and diversified with respect to the normal.

The environments presented are linked to the most recent research initiated by Numero Cromatico on the mechanisms of synaesthetic perception and on how the aesthetic experience is made up of multiple components and determined by physiological, cultural, and environmental factors. Each project’s phase is distinguished by particular sounds, smells, materials, shapes, and colors, which are offered in the form of various devices.

The objective is to create an immersive and introspective space, an environment built to trigger an intense reaction in the user and to outline a new mode of coexistence between humans and artificial intelligences and between elements that are apparently the opposite of each other, seeking to unravel the idea of distance and diversity.

photo © Percorso Urbano in Deprivazione Visiva, Numero Cromatico, 2021

THE INDEPENDENT WALL

On the occasion of MAXXI’s tenth anniversary, the Museum celebrates six years of The Independent, a research project dedicated to independent thought and practice.

The Independent Wall intends to present a retrospective view of the history of the programme conceived by Hou Hanru and curated by Giulia Ferracci and Elena Motisi.

The project presents the online mapping of independent realities, monitoring the territories of initiatives active in this field at national and international level. Launched in 2014 through an open call, from 2019 the mapping extends through the contribution of a series of contributors who propose a selection of the most innovative groups and spaces of the independent constellation each year.

photo © Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini

THE INDEPENDENT. MAX FLETCHER

with Andrea Celeste La Forgia
There are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities

THE INDEPENDENT, MAXXI’s programme dedicated to independent thought and practice, presents Max Fletcher’s special project in collaboration with Andrea Celeste La Forgia: There are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities. The work is the result of a performance conceived for the FRIENDSHIP | SOLIDARITY | ALLIANCES summit on the occasion of the five-year anniversary of THE INDEPENDENT.

Within the framework of the Summit, British artist Max Fletcher – currently residing at the British School in Rome – has produced a series of three canvases during a complex action in which words, painting and gestures combine in a critical rethinking of the past as a means of building friendships, solidarity and alliances. Pasolini is the essential reference for both the performance and the canvases, which contain three excerpts from dialectal theatrical texts taken from Pasolini himself and two of his beloved writers, Pirandello and Bertolazzi.

The selected passages – translated into English – offer a humorous representation of moments centred on a sense of community and solidarity, notions that Pasolini attributes to the dialect, understood as Gramsci did, namely as an emancipatory form of literature capable of subverting or contrasting the concepts of linear progress and formal unification.

photo © Fondazione MAXXI

THE INDEPENDENT. IL COLORIFICIO. FLASHING AND FLASHING!

The newest The Independent‘s project – the museum’s programme for independent arts – is made by the Il Colorificio, a curatorial collective and creative space based in Milan since 2016 and winner of i9 – Spazi indipendenti, the no-profit Italian award powered by ArtVerona.

The Il Colorificio’s wall presents Flashing and flashing!: seven works, one for each artist featured – Daria Blum, Deniz Eroglu, Marco Giordano, IOCOSE, Tamara MacArthur, Vasilis Papageorgiou, Michele Rizzo – and all delimited within the space of a green screen. Using virtual reality’s skills, the expositive wall expands extending the whole exhibit’s surface.

photo: Deniz Eroglu, Glow-in-the-dark-Rousseau for Deniz Eroglu Phantasm, 2017 exhibit, Il Colorificio, Milano. Courtesy the artist and Il Colorificio. Ph. Filippo Gambuti.

THE INDEPENDENT. NESXT

The second 2018 event of The Independent revolves around NESXT – Independent Art Network.

NESXT will draw a symbolic map of the practices that inhabit the ever-expanding independent national scene on the wall dedicated to The Independent by proposing a selection of eight projects: Adiacenze (Bologna), Giuseppefraugallery (Gonnesa), Localedue (Bologna), Lu Cafausu (San Cesario di Lecce), Quartiere Intelligente (Napoli), RAVE-East Village Artist Residency (Trivignano Udinese), Spazio Buonasera (Turin), There is no place like home (Rome).
The invited groups/spaces, which have been selected among those belonging to the NESXT network, will recount their story in a free, personal manner through videos and an iconographic image.
NESXT is an interdisciplinary project born in 2016 and devoted to independent cultural and artistic production that documents, supports and links associations, artist-run spaces and collectives through a festival, an observatory and a network of collaborations.

ph: Adiacenze, Bologna

THE INDEPENDENT. MORE MUSEUM OF REFUSED AND UNREALISED ART PROJECTS

The Independent opens 2018 with the MoRE group, the digital museum that collects, preserves and exhibits on line unrealised projects by 20th- and 21st-century artists. It also won i8, namely the initiative of the ArtVerona fair dedicated to independent spaces.
For this MAXXI event, MoRE presents WunderMoRE, a project curated by Ilaria Bignotti, Elisabetta Modena, Valentina Rossi, Marco Scotti and Anna Zinelli that showcases the museum’s archive by use of a collection of images.
The wall of the museum turns into an “exhibition room” based upon a perceptive disorientation caused by the indiscriminate accumulation of objects of different nature, which are only apparently exhibited following no logical or taxonomical principle. Every image comes with a brief explanation of the artist’s work and a QR code to trace the project in the MoRE digital archive. The materials will be exhibited in two different set-ups which will follow one another from March to July.

MoRE, which is a flowing, scientific, mobile container that is constantly under definition and enlargement, enhances and studies the preserved projects by use of research, articles, seminars and publications, making full use of the web’s potential and interacting with different institutions and entities also by carrying out experimental and site-specific exhibition projects and always promoting an active exchange.

The group has been selected in partnership with ArtVerona | Art Project Fair – i8 independent spaces!

THE INDEPENDENT. URBAN-THINK TANK

Founded in 1998 by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner in Caracas, since 2010 the group has been operating within the ambit of the Zurich Polytechnic, working on an international level with people from various disciplines and promoting dialogue between developing and developed countries.

At MAXXI Urban-Think Tank is presenting Città Parangolé, a reflection on utopian theories and their consequent development within the ambit of the contemporary urban context. The project was inspired by the concept of Parangolé developed in the Sixties by the artist Hélio Oiticica, extending its cardinal principal – “ life is movement” – from the human body to the urban context.
On show in the Carlo Scarpa Foyer will be an architectural model that translates the philosophy of the alternative city as a solution for the hypothetical future city of Piacenza and a graphic wall comparing present day city life with that of the future city.

Ph. Urban-Think Tank, The 1km radius Città Parangolé City

THE INDEPENDENT. CAFFÈ INTERNAZIONALE

Caffè Internazionale is a Palermo-based club managed by production manager Darrell Shines, artist Stefania Galegati and Davide Ricco, an eclectic barman-curator.

Its programme mainly revolves around music, with periodical concerts, and contemporary art, with an exhibition area which has hosted twenty-eight personal and collective projects.
The cultural programme also includes events and conferences – IntellectualEYEzed – to bridge the gap between the audience and complex topics such as contemporary art, physics, musicology, new technologies, astronomy, botany and many more.

On the occasion of The Independent, Caffè Internazionale is to involve the students of its summer school – which has reached its second year of activities under Daria Filardo and Stefania Galegati Shines’s supervision – in the realisation of a project conceived for the rooms of the museum.

THE INDEPENDENT. INSTITUTE FOR PROVOCATION

Founded in Beijing in 2010, the group Institute for Provocation (IFP) is an artistic organization and a working space that promotes cultural exchanges and production of a collective nature. IFP organizes and supports activities of various kinds, including artist residencies, research projects, debates, exhibitions, workshops, publications and so on, in the belief that artistic processes must be understood as alternative forms of the production of knowledge.

On the occasion of The Independent, Institute for Provocation is presenting the project Space Odyssey: an installation on wallpaper reproducing the physical environment of the IFP studio and the strata that make up its history and the micro-social dimension.

THE INDEPENDENT. RADICAL INTENTION

Taking the Democracy Wall Movement (created in 1978 in Beijing and reprised in the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong in 2011) as a symbol of its artistic-curatorial partnership, Radical Intention is using the museum space as a workplace to develop and construct its Dazibao, a large font mural newspaper.

The curator Aria Spinelli and the artist Maria Pecchioli, founders of the group, transform the space into a workshop for exchange and reflection, using slogans, keywords and inspiring phrases, creating, together with the public, a work in progress for the construction of a Dazibao composed of post-its.