Per_forming a collection. An Art Archive of Campania

The works selected in this additional chapter (many of which have been donated by artists, and entered into the collection over the last five years) deepen the nature of the museum’s collection which is aimed at exploring and triggering unorthodox energies and linguistic, disciplinary and methodological encroachments, in relation to the past and the present, tracing seminal figures in order to put them in a perspective and in dialogue with the research or with a rereading of the emerging artists.

The main guidelines that the Madre collection has taken over in recent years are thus confirmed: if, on the one hand, the collection tells the story of the avant-garde culture with reference to what happened in Naples and Campania in the last fifty years, on the other hand it explores the present and hypothesizes the future through the inclusion of artists who respond with new works and commissions to this story.

Similarities, assonances, recurring aspects but also differences, discards, single individuals emerge to describe an articulated and complex scenario made of meetings and discussions, generating a gaze that at the same time roots the museum’s collection in its own territory and reports it to the broader scenario of the contemporary artistic research.

The exhibition itinerary is not arranged according to a chronological order or following research lines or historical groupings, but organized as an open and mobile critical thematic narration, in which the works, the documents and the projects generate a dialogue between common practices of artists belonging to different generations, education and backgrounds.