With more than 100 original photographs and a video installation, Extraordinary Visions. Italy is a poetic and yet documentary, social and institutional “atlas” of the Italy of recent decades. The works on display come from the collections at MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts, which opened in Rome in 2010 in a building designed by the Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid: a cutting-edge venue for contemporary culture.
The exhibition features projects commissioned by MAXXI Architecture, exploring new Italian landscape aesthetics through the versatile tool of photography, and works acquired by MAXXI Art, which focuses on the most important research from the last few decades. Different generations of artists are included in the show: from representatives of the “Italian landscape school”, to members of subsequent generations, offering examples of reportage photography and artistic and conceptual experiments.
Contemporary Italy is recounted in the exhibition from three different themed perspectives: the contemporary landscape, including the “extraordinary” landscape of sublime beauty, the “ordinary” landscape of the Italian provinces and the landscape transformed by human presence; public space in the city, focusing on dynamism, transformation and representative places; and also the world of art, architecture and culture, which constitutes the beating heart of Italy and its creativity.
The exhibition closes with Olivo Barbieri’s video installation La Città perfetta. The territory of Italy’s Adriatic Coast is told through over 8.000 images in a fast-paced montage that leads the visitor into an unusual trip through a Country crossed by constant and fluid changes.