ECCO

ECCO : this year’s exhibition of works by residents of the Académie de France in Rome takes the form of an enthusiastic exclamation, restoring and extending the work of a year at the Villa Medici. Presented from June 18 to August 8, 2021 under the curatorship of Laura Cherubini, the exhibition brings together the achievements of the sixteen artists, creators and researchers at the end of a year’s creative residency, experimentation and research at Villa Medici.

Resolutely multidisciplinary, ECCO highlights the link between individual creations and collective projects, and weaves unexpected links between the disciplines represented, from painting to sculpture , photography, architecture, sound creation, art history and theory, musical composition, visual arts and literature.

The uniqueness of this 2021 edition lies in the fruitful encounter between sixteen personalities and as many artistic languages, which materialized in a collective magazine developed throughout the residency year and which today constitutes one of the exhibition’s entry points. This choral project, conceived by the residents in autumn 2020, took the form of amonthly digital publication (ecco-revue.com), which welcomes contributions in a wide variety of forms: videos, texts, soundtracks, photographs and drawings. Conceived in a free and experimental form, the magazine unfolds in seven issues, each taking as its theme a raw word that evokes a sound and/or a form as a pretext for reflection.

The end-of-year exhibition is part of this collaborative context, through which the residents have given shape to a “provisional community”, in the words of curator Laura Cherubini. The installation of each of the projects – some conceived in resonance with the magazine, others autonomous – will reveal other reliefs of contemporary creation.

Commissioner

Laura Cherubini, curator of the ECCO exhibition, is an art historian, critic and independent curator. A student of Giulio Carlo Argan and Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Laura Cherubini became Chair of Contemporary Art History at Milan’s Brera Academy in 1992. From March 2011 to December 2017, she is Vice-President of the MADRE Museum in Naples. In March 2019, as Director of the MACTE Museum (Termoli Museum of Contemporary Art), she is responsible for opening the museum with works from the Termoli Prize, which she is now curating for its ^62nd edition. As an art critic, she collaborates with daily newspapers and specialist magazines, including Flash Art (Italy and international).

In 1990, she curated the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and won the Carluccio Prize for Young Critics. In 1993, she curated the exhibition Macchine della pace at the Venice Biennale. From 2005 to 2007, she was in charge of the contemporary art program at the ING-Calcografia Nazionale in Rome. She has been a member of the juries of the Italian Bureau of PS1-MoMA, Premio Nazionale per la Giovane Arte (acquisition of the first group of works for MAXXI), Prix Furla, Prix New York, Prix du Musée de Lugano, Prix ACEA. She was a member of the Maretti Prize committee in Havana, Cuba, for two editions and curated the corresponding exhibitions. She is currently a member of the Rotary-Brera Prize committee at MIART (Milan’s international modern and contemporary art fair). Previously a lecturer at La Sapienza and LUISS universities, Laura Cherubini published in 2020 the volume Controcorrente. The great loners of Italian art. Boetti, De Dominicis, Fabro, Mauri, Pisani, Marisa Merz published by Marinotti.

With the support of Fonds de Dotation Élysées Monceau, Groupama Assicurazioni, Culinaries, Club Criollo, Fatamorgana, Cercle des Bienfaiteurs