„Rome is an amazing city which in its urban texture and human life sums up centuries of history and culture.  Clichés and paradoxes live here cheek-by-jowl: archeology and antiquity meet up with all the vitality of contemporary life: this is its real historical present , something quite different from stereotyped images.“
First thought that comes to mind when thinking of Rome, is surely not contemporary art. Keeping in mind some of the main notions of the contemporary art that nothing is constant, invariable, and that all is in fact subject to change, and often not at all what it seems, french architect and urbanist Odile Decq (in cooperation with her husband Benoit Cornett), designs the new museum of contemporary art in Rome, at the location of the former Perroni brewery.
MACRO (Museo d’ Arte Contemporanea Roma) has been conceived for a long time as a small gallery out of the main current of contemporary art. Odile’s project intents to change the perception of the old brewery into a contemporary center that will not be presented as a closed set of containers for series of art works, but an open territory, an integral part of the city and its life. Odile restrains from designing a gallery, a museum, she designs a stratified territory, a scenario, largely open to its surroundings and the city itself, whose integral part it drives to become. MACRO answers the static surround with dynamic, monement and evidence.
It is inscribed in an already built and conceived, although with no true identity, architectural and urban context in a system of transition in which all new pollutes. Its every part is complexly clear and attractive. Discovering in sequences becomes, grows into a happening. Ramps, passways, passages, communication, paths or pathways inside the exhibition spaces, the exhibition themselves, installation and happenings… offer a wide variety of possibility for experiencing, learning, looking, feeling the art. Odile does not only plan standing in front of the art pieces, but, also, from above, from below, from near or from a far perspective, from only one place or in turning around at different levels… flexibility is given to the gallery to be a tool in the hands of the invited art directors and scenographers.
„The intention of the project is to locate dynamics disbalance by identifying a point of rupture, with an objective of generating conflict, traversing the boundaries, rediscovering a sort of creative instability, which is according to Odile Decq, is the only method of achieving the harmony of the contemporary art spirit, constant exploration of new paths and means.”
Odile Decq, finds the inspiration, as for her other projects, as well as for MACRO in the constant fluxes and changes. MACRO is in one moment, in conflict, creative instability, and at the same time it establishes a harmonious link with art in constant change and exploration of boundaries.
Author: Bibi