archive wall
28 June 2023 > 21 January 2024

Time SourceFrom founts to artwork, from artwork to founts

the focus’ closing has been extended to Sunday 21 January 2024

archive wall – free admittance
curated by MAXXI Arte Archive Centre

How does a work of art live through time? How do its meanings change to the different periods and contexts it is exhibited in? How do documentary sources transmit it?

Time Source proposes an incipit to the Fuori Tutto exhibition with a selection of documentation materials dedicated to ten works on show in the Collection’s exhibition to reveal to visitors the processes of thought, conception, design and production of the work and its subsequent exhibition and reception by documenting both the reflections, meanings and motivations that preceded its creation and the different contexts, spaces and places where it was exhibited.

From the iconographic source to the material source, from the written reference to the oral source, Time Source presents through photographs, backstage videos, catalogues, interviews and other types of documents the history of artworks from the personal and intimate dimension of the artist’s studio to the shared and collective extent of the museum exhibition, from the darkness of the depository to the light of the exhibition space, from the silence of the archive to the narrative of the sources.

The documents presented on the wall and the tables migrate the history of creative thought through all the forms of transmission of memory existing today, tracing a continuum between the before, during and after production of a work, restoring the trace of intentions, scenarios and contexts that make a work immanent in different times and spaces.

header: Michelangelo Pistoletto, exhibition view, Contemporanea, 1973-1974, Rome, Villa Borghese car park. Photo by Massimo Piersanti. MAXXI Arte Archive Centre. International Art Meetings Fund (AIIA).