October 11, 2025 marks the beginning of a new phase for the MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. In fact, with the inauguration of the fall season, the first programming of the new director, Cristiana Perrella, takes shape, aiming to reaffirm the museum’s role as a living, receptive place deeply connected to the urban fabric. Promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale and the Azienda Speciale Palaexpo (which also handles its production and organization), the new season is the result of Cristiana Perrella’s artistic direction. The intent is to consolidate the link between the museum and the city, its communities, its cultural and artistic ferments, through an exhibition and cultural proposal capable of opening spaces for discussion, reflection and participation.
The direction taken by Perrella is articulated in a project that involves multiple expressive languages, from visual arts to music, from performance to cinema. The idea is to return a complex and dynamic image of Rome, today increasingly recognizable as a plural cultural laboratory, fed by widespread energies and initiatives that often arise from below. MACRO’s new phase is based on a vision that interweaves the international dimension of the museum with a concrete commitment to the local art scene and a desire to build community around an inclusive cultural proposal.
The centerpiece of the season will be the exhibition Una Roma, which can be visited from October 2025 to February 2026. Curated by Cristiana Perrella together with Luca Lo Pinto, MACRO’s outgoing director, the exhibition aims to be a choral portrait of Rome’s contemporary art scene. It is a vision that is intentionally not exhaustive, but adheres to reality, constructed according to the logic of the cinematic sequence plan: a long moving shot that intercepts what is manifested in the space and time of observation. The intent is to return an image of the city and its cultural production that, despite its partiality, is vivid, immediate, and immersive.
Set up in the two large halls of the museum designed by Odile Decq, the exhibition hosts largely unpublished works by more than forty artists, belonging to different generations and active in different fields of expression. The exhibition project is curated by Parasite 2.0 studio, which designed a structure capable of transforming the space into a walkable urban landscape. On the ground floor, an area defined by color alone (a bright green, similar to cinematic green screens) forms the backdrop and field of action for works, sounds and visions. On the upper level, however, the space is configured as a constantly changing set, designed to accommodate performances, workshops, DJ sets, conversations and projections. This level will be animated by weekly programming involving collectives, independent spaces and cultural communities in the city.
Parallel to the exhibition, a series of off-site interventions will also be activated, commissioned by MACRO but realized within the venues of some of Rome’s independent spaces. The aim is to promote autonomous projects but in dialogue with the curatorial idea of the exhibition.
With the start of the new season, MACRO will also inaugurate a 100-seat cinema hall, carved out of one of the existing conference rooms. This new space will be dedicated to first-run programming of arthouse films, works that are distributed on a limited basis or from festival circuits. In the first few months, in connection with the Una Roma exhibition, the focus will be on works by emerging Roman directors, flanked by meetings with significant figures from the city’s film scene. Starting in February 2026, the theater will be active daily with a stable proposal that will include premieres, documentaries, independent films, art-related productions and rereadings of classics.
Another highlight is the exhibition One Day You’ll Understand - Twenty-Five Years of Dissonanze, dedicated to the historic festival of electronic music and digital culture active in Rome between 2000 and 2010. The exhibition project, which will open in November 2025 and run until February 2026, is curated by Carlo Antonelli, Lorenzo Castore and Valerio Mannucci. Through visual, sound and graphic archival materials, the exhibition reconstructs the parabola of the festival conceived by Giorgio Mortari, restoring its anticipatory spirit and impact on the city and international cultural scene. The exhibition will occupy the two historic rooms on the second floor of the museum, one of which is entirely dedicated to listening. The project will be accompanied by a program of meetings, performances, concerts and guided tours, which will provide an opportunity to relate the history of the festival to the trajectories of contemporary musical and artistic production.
MACRO’s new course also includes the reactivation and expansion of many of its original functions. A project room and workshop space, a listening room and a video room will be opened. The library will become accessible again and a residency program for artists and researchers will be inaugurated. The offerings will be enriched by an articulated public program and educational activities designed for different audiences, with the intention of making the museum a permeable and participatory place. Completing the renovation, the new restaurant Materia, located on the museum terrace, and the reopening of the in-house bar will help define the MACRO as a welcoming, inclusive and accessible space.
In the path of heritage reinterpretation, part of the spaces will be dedicated to a temporary display of the historical collection, with a focus on art produced in Rome from the post-World War II period to the early 2000s. This operation will be conceived in a dynamic and relational key, in dialogue with the present.
Finally, among the special events of the fall season, the one on November 1, 2025, stands out, when the MACRO will host a preview of Una disperata vitalità. A Tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini, a new work by choreographer Enzo Cosimi. The event, part of the calendar of celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the writer’s murder organized by Roma Capitale, will be followed by a screening of Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor (2024), a queer reinterpretation of the film Teorema.
“MACRO is perhaps the only major Italian contemporary art institution to have experienced in recent years a profound and courageous confrontation with its own identity,” says Cristiana Perrella, artistic director of MACRO. “From Giorgio De Finis’s Macro Asilo (2018-2019) to Luca Lo Pinto’s Museum for Preventive Imagination (2020-2024), it has been able to traverse radically different models, enacting new forms of relationship with art, the public and the city. Today MACRO is recognized for its experimental vocation and the quality of its proposals. The goal is to root it even more firmly in the urban cultural fabric as a city museum, enhancing its everyday, living, accessible dimension and opening it up to ever wider and more heterogeneous audiences. I will therefore work on a MACRO capable of being both inviting and radical, generous and avant-garde, welcoming and stimulating, a reference point for the local art scene and a credible interlocutor on an international scale. A museum that questions its own role, that welcomes and listens, that challenges itself, where people go not only to see an exhibition, but to experience art in all its forms, to meet, to discuss, to learn and to imagine.”
“With this new season, MACRO returns to be the museum of its city: open, present, welcoming,” emphasizes Marco Delogu, President Azienda Speciale Palaexpo. “A place where every day something unexpected can happen, where art is not only contemplated, but is traversed, discussed, lived. It is a museum that speaks the language of contemporaneity, but never forgets its relationship with its context.”
“The MACRO,” says Massimiliano Smeriglio, Councillor for Culture, Municipality of Rome, “is one of the hubs of contemporary art in Rome, which is about to be, thanks to the line and proposals of the new Director Cristiana Perrella, an excellent cultural garrison that, in addition to the seasons of major exhibitions, recovers functions that were no longer active such as the very rich library, which will begin its activities again, and introduces new ones such as the opening of a cinema hall, which enriches the important work we are building in support of the sector. I am very happy, a new MACRO is being configured that will be a living space of daily sharing in which the many aspects of culture dialogue.”
 |
| Rome, kicks off MACRO's first season under new director Cristiana Perrella |
Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.
