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European Alternatives, which was launched in London in 2007 by Lorenzo Marsili and Niccolò Milanese, is a civil society transnational organisation and citizen movement stemming from an alternative understanding of Europe. It has been operating through projects, campaigns, events, studies, publications, workshops, and training sessions for ten years, supported by a large community of European and foreign partners, activists and supporters.

The Independent will see European Alternatives present the Terzo tempo/Overtime project, divided in two parts: a day-long debate and action session revolving around the idea of Europe, which is to take place on 26^th March 2017, namely the anniversary of the signing of the Treaties of Rome, and a map drawn by Marco Raparelli dedicated to the social and cultural motives which have characterised the continent ever since the crisis broke out in 2007-2008.

Founded in 2013 and based in Cyprus, Urban Gorillas is a non-profit organization run by a multi-disciplinary team of urban enthusiasts planning for healthy, creative and socially inclusive cities.
Within the context of The Independent the group is presenting Urban Spectacle, a series of public interventions exploring basic human activities in urban spaces, starting out from the relationship that is established between observer, player and spatial context and attempting to spark a new dialogue between them.
A project designed to encourage people to overcome stereotypical ways of looking at “the other” and to interact with them in public spaces.
The research conducted by Urban Gorillas to date has revealed for example that the public spaces in Cyprus are currently underused and socially segregated, a factor that has invited new and innovative methods of planning of public space. What has emerged is a wide-ranging action with urban interventions in various contexts within the city.

FouskoPolis public installation in Paphos Castle in collaboration with Plastique Fantastique | Green Urban Lab, 2015

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Founded in 2013 by Gianni Garrera, Giuseppe Garrera and Carlo Pratis, Una Vetrina is a non-stop place for the consumption of thoughts and daydreams: that which happens within the field of critical vision of the vetrina/showcase is its own museum. A space in which the contents are put in the shop window, for the attention or indifference of passers-by

The Mormorazione project is associated with the verbal vocation of the Una Vetrina space, with the frequent exposition of proclamations, writings, complaints and censures through which revolutions and utopias are denounced.
Those contributing are artists, philosophers and theologians with spare, repetitive writing, without decorative elements or superfluous signs, indifferent to graphic skills. The premise is that the highest representation is the word: every inscription invokes the replacement of reality by the word and declares that the verbal element is superior to any other manifestation of art. The highest apparition if the vision of a speech.

Composed of 11 artists, BASE / Progetti per l’arte recounts, through videos and documents, its 18 years as an independent space in Florence.

The video wall will be transmitting a selection of images of the site-specific works created in the Florence space as well as a series video interviews with the artists of the collection curated by Lorenzo Bruni. Also on show will be all the materials produced over the past 18 years and the posters created for the occasion by the individual artists in which they represent their own practices in relation to the BASE project.

BASE is an artist-run spacein Florence driven by a collective that currently numbers 11 member artists: Mario Airò, Marco Bagnoli, Massimo Bartolini, Vittorio Cavallini, Yuki Ichihashi, Paolo Masi, Massimo Nannucci, Maurizio Nannucci, Paolo Parisi, Remo Salvadori, Enrico Vezzi.
Founded in 1998 as a non-profit space, BASE has presented over 60 exhibitions of artist of international standing, with projects conceived specifically for the space. In parallel, seminar cycles, screenings and concerts have been organized, stimulating reflection on the role of culture today and in a dialogue with the city and its history.

Invited to take part in The Independent, the Boa Mistura collective has chosen to present Agopuntura nello spazio pubblico, a selection of materials from the project for social change Crossroads aimed at vulnerable communities with a high risk of marginalization.

The stairwell in the MAXXI atrium will house a digital wall composed of 14 monitors that will come to life periodically with images, videos and interviews documenting the interventions in South Africa, Mexico, Panama, Algeria, Georgia, Cuba, Brazil, Kenya, Colombia, Nicaragua and Chile.
In all these places Boa Mistura has established contacts with the local communities through participatory dynamics: the inhabitants of the various quarters have been involved in actions of aesthetic improvement that modify perception of the places, reinforcing people’s relations with and in the space in which they live.

BOA MISTURA
They met when they were 15 years old and creating graffiti on the walls of their quarter of Madrid. Today they work throughout the world, involving entire communities in the transformation of the streets in which they live through painting.

La scrittura degli echi is a work based on sound, a daily palimpsest of audio contributions that are distributed via the museum’s communications service in order to transmit a collective and ephemeral voice: free interventions, original and otherwise, by various authors in the form of recordings, readings, extracts and sound tracks.

Everyday and in unpredictable ways
the museum halls are traversed by audio tracks

Artists, writers, photographers, musicians and intellectuals have freely contributed to the project, constructing an original and atypical “aural” story: 90 voices of protagonists on the Italian and international cultural scene construct a collective and ephemeral voice capable of indirectly challenging the museum structure.

La scrittura degli echi presents audio contributions from: Acchiappashpirt, After Howl, Cory Arcangel, Gianfranco Baruchello, Chiara Barzini, Elisabetta Benassi, Riccardo Benassi, Alicja Bielawska, Ross Birrell, Massimiliano Bomba, Carola Bonfili and Francesco Fonassi, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Giuseppe Casetti, Lorenzo Castore, Spartacus Chetwynd, Alessandro Cicoria, Mike Cooper, Claudia Comte, Matthias Connor with Oliver Payne and Brian Degraw, Nina Cristante, Enzo Cucchi, Tony Cutrone, Dario D’Aronco, Emanuele De Raymondi, Costantino Della Gherardesca, Goldschmied & Chiari, Filippo de Pisis, Rä di Martino, Stanislao Di Giugno, Canedicoda, Dunja Herzog, Esc, Bob Flanagan, Mario Garcia Torres, Gelitin, Francesca Grilli, Grip Casino, Helena Hladilová, Heroin In Tahiti, Invernomuto, Tobias Kaspar, Salvatore Lacagnina, Vincenzo Latronico, Emiliano Maggi, Marcello Maloberti, Miltos Manetas, Michele Manfellotto, Fabio Mauri, Mark Morgan, Maurizio Nannucci, Matteo Nasini, Caterina Nelli, Olaf Nicolai, Giorgio Orbi, Eddie Peake, Francesco Pecoraro, Nicola Pecoraro, Luana Perilli, Alessandro Piangiamore, Cesare Pietroiusti, Giuseppe Pietroniro, Fabio Marco Pirovino, Gianni Politi, Riccardo Previdi, Primitive Art, Federico Proietti, Marco Raparelli, Max Renkel, Moira Ricci, Claudio Rocchetti, Amelia Rosselli, Andrea Salvino, Thomas Sauter, Lele Saveri, Nora Schultz, Marinella Senatore, Lorenzo Senni, Sissi, Davide Stucchi, Tijana Mamula, Luca Trevisani, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Nico Vascellari, Valentina Vetturi, Johanna Viprey, Vipra, Luca Vitone.

Developed on the basis of the project The Independent, dedicated to the mapping and presentation of independent spaces and thinking, this exhibition analyses the issues of food and nutrition, explored by the museum in the exhibition FOOD dal Cucchiaio al mondo.
The exhibition directs the gaze towards a number of Italian independents focussing their work on questions relating to food.
The exhibition presents the interventions of three groups – Pollinaria, Aspra.mente and Interferenze – regarding three fundamental ingredients of the Mediterranean diet: wheat, tomatoes and wine. Each is added progressively to the other to produce a transparent palimpsest, visible in its entirety at the end of the project. A round table at the centre symbolically represents the convivial dimension within which the project exists. Each participating group has involved artists and architects to interpret the multiple and complex declinations of food: it becomes the vehicle for examining broader issues that affect the social, political and economic spheres of the present.

The Projects

CONSORTIUN INSTABILE. POLLINARIA
Wheat is the focus for the work of the collective FutureFarmers presented by Pollinaria, a residence for artists in the Abruzzo countryside. On this occasion, MAXXI will be housing a stage of the Consortium Instabile project, realised in collaboration with Radio Papesse and devoted to the theme of rurality, presented through the medium of radio.

STRANGE FRUIT. ASPRA.MENTE
The tomato is the subject chosen by the collective Aspra.mente, which has set up a collaboration with the design duo Luigi Greco & Mattia Paco Rizzi, the artist Luigi Coppola and the activist Donato Nuzzo. The mobile kitchen they have designed, located at the centre of the space, becomes the setting for numerous activities including a training course for cooks designed for migrants (in collaboration with the Diaconia centre of Frosinone) and tasting sessions.

AUSPICIO. INTERFERENZE
Wine is taken as a central narrative element in territorial storytelling in the intervention proposed by the Interferenze group. The installation by the artistic duo composed of Enrico Ascoli and Hilario Isola presents the process of fermentation of the must, exploring its rarefied sonic dimension.

Fight-Specific Isola by Isola Art Center describes a neo-liberal Italian story, a battle of our times, in which the protagonists and the warriors are the inhabitants of Milan’s Isola quarter and the artists of the Isola Art Center.

This thirteen-year struggle and the eventual victory in the defence and reappropriation of public space against speculative building and gentrification is recounted through a photographic blow-up by Paola Di Bello portraying all the activists during the first anniversary of Isola Pepe Verde, a communal and self-run garden created in an abandoned former building materials depot. The exhibition also features the book Fight-Specific Isola, the screen prints by Lab Fight-Specific and three videos showing the changes to the quarter’s urban landscape.

Isola Art Center is an open platform for experimentation in contemporary art located in Milan’s Isola quarter that brings together Italian and international artists, critics and curators, artists’ collectives, activists, architects, researchers and students. Isola Art Center has worked for years in harmony with the local associations.

The project Informal Paths originates from the encounter between SMU-research and the French writer Philippe Vasset, now living in the French Academy at Villa Medici.

The pivotal element of their collaboration is the complex reality lying beneath Valle Borghesiana: this toponimo of Rome, starting point of the group’s research, exemplifies in a paradigmatic manner the territorial self-planning and self-management
processes affecting many territories of Italy, where unauthorized development is the normalcy.

The exhibition presents an extract of the work done by the group based on a tight relationship with the neighbourhood’s citizens.
Vasset’s first-person narrative acts as counterbalance to SMU-research work, and it invades the gallery both in its immaterial dimension – through the voice which permeates the space – and in its physical dimension – through pieces of writing printed on the walls.

Informal Paths also include the cycle Public Speech which, on a weekly basis, “activates” the gallery space with Narratives, Visions and Self-organizations. Films of all meetings with artists, activists, critics and intellectuals will be available to the public in the exhibition spaces for the whole duration of the exhibition.

With Dreams That Money Can’t Buy CURA. presents the realisation of a shared dream in which a group of artists works to create an encyclopaedic iconographical dictionary. A collage wall with printed images and videos that synthesizes the tension between eye and spectator, between surface and collage, between the two-dimensionality of the support and the three-dimensionality of the space, but also between image, value, object and presence-absence.

Founded in 2009 by Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin, CURA. is a mobile and propulsive platform devoted to exchange and dialogue among critical voices, contemporary artistic production and collaboration with institutional and independent groups.