“Like all things, the work involved in designing an exhibition is mainly about asking a lot of questions, looking for the widest possible range of references and questioning your own certainties and points of view.” This is how Pietro Ambrosini, a member of the Campomarzio collective that created the design for the Righi Collection exhibition, replied when we asked him about his work. Setting up an exhibition, in fact, is not just about the physical structure that accompanies the presentation of the artworks in the display path. It is also the result of intense interdisciplinary interaction between architecture, art and design, and the specific themes of the exhibition. Every choice that is made at this stage can have a profound effect on the way a show is perceived, experienced and understood by the public. In this issue of Museion Bulletin we unveil certain aspects of this process through previously unpublished material. This includes the sketches for the layout of the exhibition, AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS Works from the Enea Righi Collection, accompanied by the notes made by the Campomarzio collective.
Building a world based on a paradox
Campomarzio and the exhibition design of AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS
An exhibition often involves building a world based on a paradox, as the design is both visible and invisible at the same time. It is a semi-hidden substructure that gives rise to more questions than answers. It is a palimpsest with its own logic, tricks and traps. It suggests rather than clarifies. It emphasizes certain things while concealing others. And sometimes it reveals its secrets, allowing us to discover its underlying plot.
Exhibition design is so intense as it is the result of a collective multidisciplinary process made up of countless branches. Interacting with the curators is crucial, as they are the ones who trace the connections between the artworks, the exhibition space and the nodes of meaning that underpin the show. The exhibition design must serve them by operating at a more hidden level. Balancing all this is often difficult. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you do nothing and just let the works speak for themselves, and sometimes you take more radical paths in which the language of the exhibition design stands out, bending the space or creating special points of interest.
The AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS exhibition design was the result of a long and delicate collective enterprise, in which the extraordinary power of the works, their quantity and density risked upsetting this delicate balance. The idea was that visitors should experience the exhibition path not just as a visit to an art show, but as an intimate, personal journey.
This is precisely why it was drawn by hand. Numerous sketches and design drafts were prepared to provide a quick and ‘fresh’ view, almost in real time, of how the display would work. So, as choices were made, one by one, they were continually tested. Everything was then redrawn to scale, to recheck the dimensions and relationships between the spaces, the voids and the solids, and then change them again. The result of this repetitive process is a show in which nearly 14 different exhibitions are ‘concealed’.
One thing in particular that remained almost unchanged throughout all these different revisions was the entrance portal. The entire group thought that a threshold was needed. As having to cross a symbolic and physical border would create a pause and a moment of entry to the ‘world’ of the exhibition.
The portal had to be a pure, archetypal kind of object, as large and solid as an archaeological structure, but at the same time as immaterial and fragile as a mirage. It needed to be an infrastructure that would ‘break’ institutional logic by creating a hybrid boundary between inside and outside, while remaining consistent with the place housing it and the idea that a museum is a complex space of interaction and relationships. Last of all, it had to emphasize one of the central themes of the entire exhibition, namely the body. Or better, what is that thing we call the body? What are its limits and what relationship do we have with it? How do we live in it and how does it live in space?
In one way, it was natural to imagine it as a reflective, almost hedonistic object - a cheeky reference to Superstudio’s Monumento Continuo - whose mirrored surface would resonate with both Philippe Parreno’s incredible work - multiplied to infinity - and the public, who in the act of passing through it, would see, question and perhaps recognize themselves.
The exhibition AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS Works from the Enea Righi Collection is on display at Museion until 02.03.2025. Opening times Tue-Sun 10am - 6pm, Thu 10am - 10pm (free admission from 6pm).
The exhibition design presents a wide range of artworks, architectural projects and artists’ books by renowned international artists. The artworks selected encourage viewers to reflect on the transitional spaces of contemporary existence, where socio-political tensions interweave with artistic expression.
