Ambiènte Archìvio

How many ways and with what expressions has the relationship of work with space been defined? Environment, immersive work, and environmental work are just some of the many definitions used in an attempt to explain processes and developments in the relationship between art, space, and environment.

Ambiènte Archìvio, through a selection of materials from the Centro Archivi Arte, recounts the development of space-environmental research through the different declinations of the term environment, migrated and consolidated in the historical-critical lexicon. The study proposes a mapping of the words used in the lexicon of art from Lucio Fontana’s Ambiente spaziale a luce nera (1949) to Zaha Hadid’s museo-ambiente (2010).

The exhibition focuses on three semantic macro-areas defined according to three possible declinations of the term: Space-environment, the first experimental phase in which the artists measure themselves in the design phase with the passage from the work-object to the work-environment; Perception-environment, a chapter that accommodates an immersive, experiential, performative dimension involving other disciplines, leaving the spaces of galleries and museums to reconnect with urban and social space, up to the canonisation of environmental art with the 1976 Venice Biennale; Dimension-environment, a moment of transition in which the term “installation” appears more and more frequently with all its variations and lexical derivations, connoting an increasingly evident relationship between the work and the context in which it is set up.

header: Graziella Lonardi Buontempo in Gino Marotta’s room, 1970, Vitalità del Negativo, Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Photo Cristina Ghergo. MAXXI Arte Archive Centre, Incontri Internazionali d’Arte Fund. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI.