Erin Campbell

{Between Museum & Object}

Campbell engages with the concrete presence of Aldo Rossi and the flowing system of the MAXXI Museum in a deliberate gesture – Stitching Monumentality. The stitching occurs through extraction and reinsertion of the MAXXI circulation space. Monumentality, on the other hand, is conveyed through the inserted walls of screen grids, which creates a looming presence of Rossian formal language.

There is an obvious set of contingent moments: seven inserted objects, which seem to be floating or situated within a net of invisible coordinates within the MAXXI. One of the major interventions is a cross-level grid system which takes over the MAXXI. Such a gesture shifts the conventional institutional setting of the museum to the museum as displayed object.

With the screen grid systems stitched into the corridors, permeability becomes a present trope inside the museum. Such a gesture also implies a sense of temporality regardless of its strong monumentality and registers qualities of the ‘unfinished’ similar to the exposed skeleton of Rossi’s Modena Cemetery project. The surprising thinness of the screen grid suggests an uncanniness specific to exhibition contexts.

-Review (excerpt) by Yichen Cao