From December 11, 2025, MACRO - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma returns to welcome the public with a new season that marks the start of Cristiana Perrella’s artistic direction. The reopening comes at the end of a period of preparation and restoration of the spaces and presents itself as a moment of relaunch of the institution within the city’s cultural scene. The programming is promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, and is produced and organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo itself.
The opening to the public is accompanied by a calendar of initiatives intended to encourage a wide and immediate enjoyment of the museum. The opening is scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 11, from 6 to 10 p.m., while on Friday, Dec. 12, Saturday, Dec. 13 and Sunday, Dec. 14, admission will be free for all MACRO activities, including exhibitions, film screenings and meetings. Cinema programming will also remain free until Jan. 4, 2026. The exhibition season, which runs through April 2026, is conceived as a unified project that takes Rome as its thematic and narrative centerpiece. The focus on the city emerges both in the choice of content and in the articulation of the languages involved, which range from visual arts to music, from cinema to performance, to reflections on urban planning and contemporary living modes. The MACRO is thus proposed as a traversable and receptive place, capable of flanking the exhibitions with a daily program and strengthening its role as an accessible public space.
Along with the reopening of the exhibition halls, the museum also returns to full operation in its services. Spaces dedicated to education and training reopen, a new permanent cinema hall is inaugurated, and bar activities resume. The newly renovated Materia restaurant comes fully into the life of the museum as a permanent service, opening Tuesday through Saturday from 12 noon to 4 p.m., Friday and Saturday evenings, and Sunday lunchtime. Also in preparation is the reopening of the library spaces, set to gradually become available to the public again. The overall project of the season is based on the idea of Rome as a laboratory in transformation, characterized by a cultural vitality that in recent years has also found expression through independent initiatives and practices born from below. The museum chooses to relate these energies to a broader perspective that can place them in an international context. The focus on the Capital thus takes on a double meaning: on the one hand a tribute to the city, and on the other an opportunity to tell its story beyond its borders.
The four exhibitions opening simultaneously on December 11 constitute the main nuclei of this narrative. UNAROMA, curated by Cristiana Perrella and Luca Lo Pinto, director of MACRO from 2020 to 2024, is on view until April 6, 2026. The exhibition brings together more than seventy artists of different generations and languages and proposes an image of the Roman scene as a hybrid, intergenerational reality in constant ferment. The installation, designed by Parasite 2.0 studio, adopts the metaphor of the cinematic green screen, a common surface that allows the overlapping and layering of works. The exhibition route is divided into three moments. Set, on the ground floor, presents a long green strip that crosses the space and along which the works are arranged according to an associative criterion, without thematic or chronological hierarchies. Live, on the second floor, hosts live interventions that include performances, concerts, DJ sets, conversations, workshops and screenings, with weekly and extended evening openings. Off extends the project beyond the museum, involving a number of independent Roman spaces called upon to independently develop exhibitions, performances, awards and open studios in their own venues.
On the opening weekend, Saturday, Dec. 13 at 4 p.m., UNAROMA is joined by the UNAROMA Flashback meeting, designed as a historical prequel to the exhibition. The appointment, moderated by Cristiana Perrella, involvesLauraCherubini, Stefano Chiodi, Manuela Pacella and Giuseppe Armogida, four voices from the Roman cultural and academic context who will offer a reading of the city scene from the 1980s to the present.
One Day You’ll Understand. 25 Years of Dissonanze, curated by Cristiana Perrella and open from Dec. 11, 2025 to March 22, 2026, traces the experience of the festival of the same name that between 2000 and 2010 helped transform Rome into an international reference point for electronic music, digital culture and sound-related artistic practices. Through an extensive visual and sound archive, the exhibition restores the pioneering character of Dissonanze and its relationship with architecture and urban spaces, occupying such emblematic places as the Ara Pacis, the Palazzo dei Congressi, the Cappa Mazzoniana at Termini station and the Pietralata area.
Jonathas de Andrade. Unnamed Sisters, on view through April 6, 2026, features a new video by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade. The work was commissioned by Conciliazione 5, a space for contemporary art promoted by the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, and is produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film. The work stems from research conducted at the Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso and reconstructs the story of a community of nuns in Brazil in the 1960s that intertwined spirituality, political engagement and social pedagogy. Following threats from the military dictatorship, the nuns left their vows and moved to Rome, continuing their work as laywomen. Through archival materials and direct testimonies, the video relates the contexts of Belo Horizonte and Rome, returning a reflection on collective practices of resistance and freedom.
Inhabiting the Ruins of the Present, curated by Giulia Fiocca and Lorenzo Romito of the Stalker collective, is on view from December 11, 2025 to March 22, 2026. The exhibition focuses on a number of urban regeneration processes that have contributed to the reshaping of Rome’s structure over the years. The project stems from Agency for Better Living, presented at the Austrian Pavilion of the Architecture Biennale 2025, and compares the experiences of Rome and Vienna with respect to possible forms of living in the context of environmental and social crisis. Spontaneous practices of reuse and spaces characterized by resilience and diversity are presented at MACRO, considered as generators of strategies of social and ecological adaptation.
Parallel to the exhibitions, the MACRO’s cinema, a new hall designed as a permanent infrastructure, is inaugurated. In its first months of operation, the cinema will be open from Friday to Sunday. From Dec. 11, 2025 to April 6, 2026, the Cine-città exhibition , curated by Sergio Sozzo and Sara Pirone and produced in collaboration with the CSC-Cineteca Nazionale, is dedicated to the Roman film scene. Every Friday there are screenings introduced by up-and-coming directors who will present their latest film, while on Sunday mornings the program offers visions of the city through selected works introduced by Italian and international authors active in Rome. The entire season is accompanied by an articulated public program that includes concerts, performances, meetings, presentations, screenings and in-depth moments. This is complemented by the activities of the Educational, Training and Didactic Services, which contribute to strengthening the idea of the museum as a space open to the community and accessible to different audiences.
Statements
“With the reopening of the MACRO,” says Roberto Gualtieri, Mayor of Roma Capitale, “Rome expands even more its already rich cultural proposal, with a museum that, enhancing the positive experiences of the past years, wants to strengthen its hybrid identity, open to the multiple forms of contemporary art. In this its new season, the MACRO confirms its vocation to dialogue with international trends and, at the same time, restores the vitality of the Roman contemporary scene while also expanding its modes of fruition with a bar, a studio room, a new cinema and a space for. music, performances and cultural activities. I want to thank the director Cristiana Perrella, Marco Delogu’s Palexpo and Massimiliano Smeriglio’s Culture Department for their valuable work during this relaunch phase.”
“The reopening of the MACRO is a strong signal of returning to citizenship a cultural garrison capable of embracing, as the exhibition season dedicated to Rome and all the events built around it, designed for citizens, already tells us,” says Massimiliano Smeriglio, Councillor for Culture of Roma Capitale.MACRO will generate participation and community, thanks to the proposals of the new director Cristiana Perrella and the work we have done together in making this permanent cultural garrison a hybrid space, equipped with a renewed and very rich library, a cinema hall, while continuing to be a museum with its exhibitions and nurturing the relationship with artists. A public presidium that starts with a completely free weekend of celebration and that is grafted into the cultural infrastructure we are building for Rome. Where ideas meet, where there is participation, the city community grows, freedom grows and the different souls of the city are given a voice, energies are released. With the aim that the MACRO will also contribute, together with the other Roman cultural structures and principals, to strengthening the vision of a city projected onto the international stage."
“From today the MACRO is one of the places where the city can once again recognize itself by rediscovering its energy,” continues Marco Delogu, president of Azienda Speciale Palaexpo. “A contemporary museum has the task of creating connections, offering tools to read the present and supporting those creative communities that make Rome a living and complex cultural capital. MACRO’s new season goes in this direction: it puts languages and generations in dialogue, encourages the emergence of new perspectives and recomposes the fabric of relationships that nourishes the city’s cultural life. A museum that can play a decisive role in supporting the growth of communities, nurturing openness, confrontation and that sense of civic responsibility that makes the artistic and social fabric in which we live stronger and more cohesive.”
“I imagine the MACRO as a composite, flexible and welcoming organism, capable of breathing together with the city and restoring its rhythm, contradictions and potential,” concludes Cristiana Perrella,Artistic Director MACRO - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma.“Rome is a place of inexhaustible production of meaning, where art, music, cinema, literature and thought intertwine, generating ever new forms of dialogue.This horizon also includes the choice of the verse ”Dear City (embrace me),“ by the young poet Alberto Dubito, which we thought of not as the title of the new exhibition season but as an invitation that the museum addresses to Rome: a gentle yet radical exhortation so that the city and the communities that inhabit it can reappropriate the museum, love it, frequent it, experience it as a place of their own. The MACRO wants to be all of this: a permeable space that welcomes different languages and allows them to resonate; a place that reflects the complexity of the city and, at the same time, projects it out into the world, with a gaze capable of uniting what is happening near and what is happening elsewhere. A museum that offers not only exhibitions, but opportunities to meet, times and ways to be together, to read the present and imagine the future.”
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| MACRO reopens Dec. 11 and dedicates new season to Rome |
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