Bolognese museum collections through the eyes of six artists: The Floating Collection at MAMbo

MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna presents from October 28, 2022 to January 8, 2023 the exhibition project The Floating Collection, with which the museum opens its fall season of exhibitions. Curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni, this is a group show that stems from a desire to study the extensive collections of Bologna’s museums (of the Bologna Civic Museums Sector and other city museum systems) through the eyes of six artists: Alex Ayed (Strasbourg, 1989), Rä di Martino (Rome, 1975), Cevdet Erek (Istanbul, 1974), David Jablonowski (Bochum, 1982), Miao Ying (Shanghai, 1985), Alexandra Pirici (Bucharest, 1982).

In preparation for the exhibition, through visits, in-depth meetings with museum staff and spontaneous drifts, numerous collections and significant places in the city were transformed into resources, into a research platform with the intention of opening socio-cultural and aesthetic investigations.

The Floating Collection draws inspiration from the debate and processes of decolonization initiated in ethnographic and anthropological museums around the world that, since the 1990s, have engaged in a revision of the history of their heritages, experimenting with new approaches to investigating collections and mediating with the public. In line with this context, the exhibition aims to draw attention to the languages of the visual arts by proposing them as tools capable of rereading the histories of the city, reactivating and re-imagining them beyond the usual narrative structures and methodological approaches.

To the encyclopedic and cataloguing approach that characterizes the Western and modern museum model, the"floating collection" contrasts itself by moving on the boundaries of disciplines without delineating rules or unitary readings, but by posing questions, offering imaginaries and keeping open continuous oscillations and variations. The protagonists of the project are precisely the ideas and imaginaries that have emerged from a reconsideration of them. The artists thus accompany the audience in a reflection on museology and its superstructures, on the socio-cultural history of the territory, on the evocative nature of artifacts, and on the potential of creating fictional worlds capable of shedding light on the way in which to this day we organize and value information. By dwelling on the methods by which the visual arts relate to the study of society, the exhibition also aims to serve as an example of the polyphony of styles, techniques and approaches that characterize more recent contemporary arts.

In MAMbo’s programming, The Floating Collection fits into and at the same time attempts to go beyond the line of inquiry inaugurated in 2020 and continued in 2021 by the exhibition focus cycle Re-Collecting, in which existing works belonging to the collections of the civic museums were subjected to new interpretative perspectives with the aim of renewing and making more dynamic the relationship with visitors and proposing unusual paths of meaning.

Among the sources of inspiration common to both Re-Collecting and The Floating Collection, as Lorenzo Balbi points out in one of the introductory essays in the publication coming out with the opening of the exhibition, is the vision of Franco Solmi, director of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, who in his inaugural speech in 1975 outlined the identity, mission and vision of the nascent GAM:

“The museum, in its being a structure that is engaging and involved in the reality of the city and the territory and, at the same time, a natural filter of experiences that transcend this reality, can become a cultural center in the broadest sense of the term, where the things we say about culture are not only presented, but are created, discussed and perhaps contested in order to give rise to that debate between different ideal orientations in which a policy of culture that does not want to be only nominally pluralistic is made concrete. [...] Programs should not be seen as the juxtaposition of one event to another or mere sum of different initiatives, but as a cycle of activities aimed at the debate on a problem, which certainly cannot be exhausted in a solution, even a temporal one, fixed in advance. [...] That is why it seems right to me to replace the concept of exhibition with the more inclusive and open concept of activity.”

Making this vision its own and actualizing it, The Floating Collection goes further than what has already been implemented with Re-Collecting, inviting artists to produce, after visiting and getting to know the collections of Bologna’s museums, completely new works, inspired by the suggestions received during the visits, that of the city’s cultural heritage propose completely new and original interpretations.

In this way, the space of the Sala delle Ciminiere becomes a container for a new “floating collection” that makes us reflect, leaving the public anything but passive spectators, as Caterina Molteni explains in her introductory essay on the exhibition. “The floating collection,” she says, “floats in the air to be observed again wondering what other trajectories can be generated by it, how its parts, with the stories they hold, are able to suggest new avenues of inquiry, not only about the museum but about the world around us. The absence of gravity then becomes an opportunity to take our hands off our hips, raise them to the objects, start turning them over carefully, and ask ourselves some questions.”

There are several sources and cues that can be traced in the works in the exhibition.To arrive at the creation of the Sun Drawings series, which includes heliograph strips from the Specola Museum, Alex Ayed spent several weeks in Bologna visiting the city’s museum collections, with particular attention to those of the Sistema Museale di Ateneo. Fascinated by the encyclopedic nature of the scientific and educational collections amassed by the University of Bologna over the centuries, he became interested in the various methods of cataloging and measuring enacted by human beings to study the cosmos and other earthly creatures. Rä di Martino, in the music composed by Mauro Remiddi for the video Moonbird, reworks sound samples of ancient musical instruments, part of the collection of the International Museum and Library of Music in Bologna. Cevdet Erek, for his site-specific architectural installation adopted a broad perspective: in a process of measurement extended to the entire city, the artist was interested in the rhythms and pauses traceable along the streets, museums, among the porticoes and towers, up to the Sala delle Ciminiere of the MAMbo that hosts the work. His work includes a loan of the 19th-century plaster cast of the carved cross (9th-10th century) originally placed outside San Lorenzo in Varignana, from the Museo Civico Medievale in Bologna. David Jablonowski presents in the exhibition, in addition to a series of existing sculptural works, a new production titled Geo-fenced commodity futures (renewable, traced, hard) I-V, born out of a reflection on the history of materials within museum collections, places where it is possible to observe how the concepts of innovation and obsolescence have shaped the identity of specific objects, and how the same along with the technology they proposed have been signifiers over time of a certain idea of progress. Miao Ying, for Surplus Intelligence, a new film production born out of a reflection on the action of collecting in contemporary society, drew on the collections of the Museo Civico Medievale and other evidence of the Middle Ages in the city to create a work that relates past forms of surveillance and influence, such as the system of indulgences with contemporary processes of data collection. Finally, Alexandra Pirici brings to Bologna a two-performer version of the performance Re-collection, which is structured as a “living” collection whose objects are transformed into movements, without labels or need for classification. Real and fictional works of art, fragments of songs or poems, or real and imaginary life forms are remembered through the bodies, voices and movements of the performers.

The institutions and museums in addition to MAMbo that have been the subject of research for The Floating Collection are numerous. For the Bologna Civic Museums Sector: Museo Civico Archelogico, Museo Civico Medievale, Museo Civico d’Arte Industriale and Galleria Davia Bargellini, Museo del Tessuto e della Tappezzeria “Vittorio Zironi,” Museo Morandi, Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica, Museo del Patrimonio Industriale, Museo civico del Risorgimento. For the Sistema Museale di Ateneo | Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna: Museum of Palazzo Poggi, Museum of the Specola, Collection of Zoology, Collection of Comparative Anatomy, Collection of Anthropology. Other city institutions include the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, the Certosa Monumental Cemetery, and the Opificio delle Acque.

Coinciding with the exhibition will be the publication of The Floating Collection (Edizioni MAMbo, texts in Italian and English), edited by Caterina Molteni, conceived as an extension of the research on the collections of the Bolognese museums surveyed. The publication consists of an introductory section with essays by curators Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni; a section devoted to the artists with a text on the work in the exhibition and a collection of visual notes from their visit to Bologna as references that allow them to visualize the research phase; and finally a chapter with three previously unpublished short stories by Wissal Houbabi, Vaiva GrainytÄ— and Lisa Robertson, whose very different narrative styles extend the reflection on the collections.

For info: www.mambo-bologna.org

Image: Detail of the Zoology Collection, Sistema Museale di Ateneo | Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna. Photo by Ornella De Carlo

Bolognese museum collections through the eyes of six artists: The Floating Collection at MAMbo

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