This exhibition comprises pieces from the permanent collection of the Castagnino + Macro museums, pitting works from a Fine Arts and modern art museum against others from a contemporary art museum. Given that both institutions share the same administration and address, this felicitous situation enables work on a contemporary concept which is not defined in chronological terms but rather from the point of view of an investigation. Contemporaneity supposes a focus on diversity on the basis of a given actuality, one open to expanding different historical moments. Thus the term “actuality” is used to refer to the crossroads between different temporalities existing at the same time. So it is perhaps incorrect to talk about a contemporaneity in the same way as one used to talk about a modernity (the Euro-Occidental version) deployed in evolutionary terms according to a certain conception of progress. For contemporaneity refers to diverse moments as much as it does to different cultures and varied technical media, to other ways of looking at things, which can be articulated in proposals for complex exhibition works. This is something at once provisional and intense.
In an explicit search for anachronism, the exhibition explores the relationships between the works from both museums and seeks to create what the images themselves produce: partnership, identification, collision. It is hoped that these encounters, which can be both a clash and a coincidence, will produce short circuits, synergies capable of deepening the meaning of the works on show and prompting new lines of meaning.
The symbol of the river, which is omnipresent at the Macro, is not so much of an issue per se as it is a prompt for questions about the flow of images, the environment, and the enigma of the river banks facing each other, the archetypical difference (between artistic and subjective genres). The water course is imbued with meaning, the repository of the stories of a region traversed by a potent and patent river, a witness of multilayered events and the brand marking the identity of a territory shared in the South.
