Rome Contemporary
Profile
The Research Priority Rome Contemporary aims to reevaluate the significance of Rome in the artistic sphere during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. During this time, established narratives on the one hand insist on an increasing peripheralization of the city and on the other, demonstrate how the self-referential formula of Rome’s historically unique position endures.
In engaging with previous art historical interpretations, Rome Contemporary supports innovative research on the Roman art scene by probing into and mapping its international entanglements. This initiative challenges the common assumption that with the end of the Ancien Régime the city lost its far-reaching importance in the art world. It does so by inviting studies that examine objects from the visual arts and related fields with consideration of their particular conditions of production, publication, and circulation in Rome and beyond.
Rome Contemporary confronts universalizing tendencies in modern scholarship on contemporary art by emphatically focusing on the idiomatic alongside the spatiotemporal and cultural situatedness of its objects of inquiry. This initiative is also aimed at destabilizing a narrow understanding of locality. The trope of Rome as a palimpsest is interrogated by recalling the network of reciprocal exchange processes that have linked and still connect the city translocally. This aspect of Rome Contemporary seeks both to define and expand upon the various frames of reference encountered in the Roman art scene in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In a related manner, the initiative enables and promotes an ongoing discussion surrounding the historiographical conventions, canons, and structures upon which the history of contemporary art in Italy relies.
Report 2022–2024
Rome Contemporary has been a catalyst for scientific innovation within the Department, including new research procedures and activity formats, a focus on counterculture, Feminism, Gender Studies, Marxism, and the introduction of Artistic Research.
Rome’s Art Scene
To establish Rome Contemporary as a Research Priority, new research methodologies were developed that would funnel otherwise separate operations into one pipeline and integrate them into one system. Starting in 2018, in collaboration with the Institute’s Photographic Collection as well as the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI), the Department had all of Massimo Piersanti’s photographs documenting Rome’s art scene of the 1970s digitized, cataloged, and published online in open-access. In November 2022, the Institute’s first public Research Exhibition Massimo Piersanti and the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, organized by Maria Giovanna Virga, curator with Palaexpo, served to publicize this new digital archive. Moreover, in collaboration with the Institute’s Public Relations, the first Hertziana Insights research video, Massimo Piersanti. Exhibition Photography in 1970s Rome, was produced to launch the Rome Contemporary initiative. This threefold strategy significantly raised scholarly and public awareness about Piersanti’s oeuvre before he passed away on February 4, 2023.
Italian Counterculture
The next step in conceiving an integrated research environment has been undertaken with a large project dedicated to Italian postwar counterculture. The goal was to interlock new digital resources, a group of Fellows working with the digitized materials, a variety of scientific activities exploring the materials in context, and peer-reviewed publication opportunities to showcase the Fellows' scholarly work. The digitization, classification, and open-access publication of one thousand rare documents from the Echaurren Salaris Archive of postwar counterculture in 30k scans, undertaken with the support of the Institute’s Library, was publicized in May 2021, accompanied by the screening of the Hertziana Insights video Pablo Echaurren and the Counterculture Years, which garnered considerable press coverage. Thanks to this initiative, the most important private collection of Italian countercultural material (fanzines, posters, notebooks, photographs, etc.) has been made accessible for research. Following an international call, three dedicated Postdoctoral Fellowships were granted to candidates with research projects ranging from the appropriation of Native Americans in Italian underground culture, through male domesticity in Italian postwar art, to Echaurren’s avant-garde comics. The group collaborated on a large number of scientific activities including Film and Research Seminars. To contextualize Echaurren’s graphic production, one of the Fellows introduced a focal point on underground comics, dedicating Workshops and Research Seminars to fanzines, comic magazines, and underground publishers, and participated in exhibitions and festivals to showcase the digitized material. The final step in this integrative research workflow led to two peer-reviewed articles published in the Institute’s 2023 Jahrbuch issue and the collected volume Pablo Echaurren. Art for the Many in the Studi della Bibliotheca Hertziana series, which will appear in early 2025.
The Digital Staccioli Archive
A further step towards new institutional pipelines and infrastructures for scholarship in this field was undertaken with the development of an integrated digital research environment across the Institute’s Scientific Services that coalesce in the DH Lab. The pilot project started with the digitization of the archive of Mauro Staccioli (1937–2018), one of Italy’s major postwar abstract sculptors, which was held in his former studio near Volterra. The challenge of digitizing and cataloging a great variety of media, including drawings, collages, photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, journals, books, and three-dimensional models, was addressed and surmounted collaboratively by the Library and the Photographic Collection, thereby supplying a model of how to conduct complex, large-scale digitization projects. For the first time, the DH Lab members merged their different expertises and pooled their efforts to build a Knowledge Graph database containing and semantically linking all the archival documents, to which the Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI) contributed technological solutions. From the 29k scans related to the sculptural projects conceived by Staccioli between 1969 and 1988, some representative original documents were shown in the Research Exhibition Mauro Staccioli: Cementing an Artistic Legacy, curated by Marica Antonucci and accompanied by the Workshop Scultura italiana dal secondo dopoguerra agli anni Ottanta. The Staccioli Digital Archive acts both as an open-access database of Staccioli’s papers and as a documentation of the Research Exhibition. Apart from considerable public interest, the integrative research initiative has resulted in one article in the Institute’s 2024 issue of the Jahrbuch, and one Ph.D. thesis on Staccioli’s political abstraction, which is currently being undertaken at the UZH by Caterina Martinelli, director of Volterra’s new Mauro Staccioli museo archivio.
Feminism
In 2022 former Postdoctoral Fellow, Giorgia Gastaldon, was able to secure an Italian Council grant (60k EUR) with the Institute to publish an edited volume on Feminism and art in postwar Italy. With the help of the Institute’s Publications and Public Relations Services, the volume Now We Have Seen. Women and Art in the Seventies in Italy was printed in 2024, accompanied by a Workshop, a social media campaign, a Hertziana Insights video, and book presentations in Germany and New York. This project is another successful example of integrated research.
The Art Fellowship
The Department introduced Artistic Research into its portfolio as a way to incorporate contemporary practices of applied knowledge production. As the Institute offers neither residencies nor studios, the Art Fellowship is not subject to regular calls but granted only on the occasion of specific art-and-science collaborations. In 2018/19, Christoph Keller was the first Art Fellow of the Institute; however, due to the pandemic, his Research Exhibition Data Error – Roma Antichità, curated by Lara Demori, was postponed to 2023.
The second Art Fellow, Grégory Sugnaux, conducted research on the visual history of the Institute, producing a series of paintings, a video by Paul Fritz and Virginie Sistek, a catalogue, and the Research Exhibition Post Scriptum, also curated by Lara Demori, thereby setting an example of how Artistic Research can be integrated into the Institute’s intellectual environment.
Due to the success of the Art Fellowship, the Department has proposed to expand the model to the MPG under the heading Artistic Research with the Max Planck Society; if funded, this initiative will be coordinated by the Department.
Exploring the Contemporary
Hou Hanru, former Artistic Director at the Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI), accepted a Wittkower Fellowship to study today’s challenge of curating in globalized urban spaces. His research was dedicated to craft and industrialization in postwar Italian visual art, the reception of Pasolini’s oeuvre in contemporary art, and postwar, especially feminist art criticism as social critique.
In the past three years, an intense activity of Field Seminars has taken place, including the 2022 and 2024 Venice Art Biennials, and the 2023 Architecture Biennial. The Department has also organized a series of Field Seminars on Rome’s Art Galleries in Context with Isabella Vitale, curator of PianoB. In the vein of the Echaurren and Staccioli projects, visits were organized to the archives of the artists Gianfranco Baruchello, Roberto Matta, and Fabio Mauri.
Outlook
In early 2025 the second edition of Rome’s Art Galleries in Context will take place, and the collected volume Pablo Echaurren. Art for the Many will be published in the Studi della Bibliotheca Hertziana. Ways to fund the digitization of the second half of the Staccioli archive are being explored, and the Department will coordinate a conference dedicated to Baruchello. Following a competitive call, the project Artistic Research with the Max Planck Society was adopted by the President, who is looking for private sponsorship to implement it.
Projects
