Pompei@Madre. Materia Archeologica: Le Collezioni

The exhibition “Pompei@Madre. Materia Archeologica: Le Collezioni”, organized by the Madre museum in collaboration with the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, explores the potential multiple relationships between archaeological heritage and modern and contemporary artistic research, creating a dialogue between extraordinary but rarely displayed material from Pompeii and the artworks of Madre museum site-specific collection.

The dialogue with the materials and artefacts from Pompeii puts the artworks of the site-specific collection of the Madre museum back into perspective, transforming the museum into a real “contemporary domus”. The frescoed gallery decorated with majolica designed by Francesco Clemente becomes the hub of the domus, in other words the tablinum and triclinium: the reception room of the owner of the house (dominus) and the space for parties and banquets.

The extensive temporal perspective evoked by the pairing of archaeology and contemporaneity enables us to explore the materiality of the archeological artifact and, therefore, the intimate fragility, the ephemeral nature and the entropic destiny of every art work, of each civilization and culture, of the History itself.

Pompeii represents an extraordinary laboratory in which time has stood still for centuries, giving back fragments of a long-lost civilization that still remains resilient. Pompeii is a veritable time machine, which, by providing us with the history of the materials immersed within the flow of time, blurs the difference between past and present, nature and culture, life and death, destruction and reconstruction.