QUORUM, contemporary art festival kicks off at the Baths of Diocletian

The Quadriennale of Rome and the National Roman Museum present, from Friday June 9 to Sunday June 11, 2023 at the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, QUORUM. A festival of contemporary art. A three-day event of workshops, talks, performances, exhibitions, screenings, and music to question the meaning of cultural disciplines and their relationship with society. Admission is free while places last.

“In the varied panorama of Italian festivals, one dedicated to Italian contemporary art was missing; in the vast program of initiatives that the Quadriennale di Roma is producing under the artistic direction of Gian Maria Tosatti, we thought we would begin to fill this void,” said Umberto Croppi, president of the Quadriennale di Roma. “It is a beginning,” he continued, “the experimental start of a path that we intend to continue over time, with the prospect of creating a tool, increasingly broader and more participatory, that allows us to take stock of the production, criticism, and diffusion of contemporary art, in Italy and abroad. With the caution and care that a new creature requires, but without the ambition to exhaust a task that will require time and gradual involvement, we hope that all those who care about one of the most vibrant sectors of our culture will want to support us with their active participation.”

"We are really pleased to participate in the realization of QUORUM and to welcome it in the great Halls of the Baths of Diocletian, because the National Roman Museum is a museum of archaeology that questions and confronts modernity and contemporaneity, also thanks to the dialogue with prestigious institutions such as the Quadriennale of Rome," commented Stéphane Verger, director of the National Roman Museum. “The relationship between ancient and contemporary has always underpinned the process of intellectual and artistic transmission that shapes the world in which we live, and participation in this festival is a way for the museum to actualize this composite and multifaceted relationship, also represented by the exhibition L’istante e l’eternité. Between Us and the Ancients, curated by Massimo Osanna, Stéphane Verger, Maria Luisa Catoni and Demetrios Athanasoulis, which is underway in Halls I-V.”

The event will take place in the four large Halls of the Baths, with dedicated access from Viale Luigi Einaudi, and will host in particular talks entrusted to the moderation of the artistic director of the Quadriennale Gian Maria Tosatti, in which artists, critics, university professors, philosophers, representatives of institutions, directors and curators of Italian and international museums, and representatives of nonprofit spaces will confront each other.

Among others, Nicola Trezzi, director and curator of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv - Yafo, Daphne Vitali, curator National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Virginia Sommadossi, creative director Centrale Fies, Massimo Bray, general director Treccani, Francesca Guerisoli, artistic director Museo d’arte contemporanea di Lissone, Lorenzo Balbi, artistic director MAMbo, Alessandro Giuli, president Fondazione MAXXI, Angela Tecce, president Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee - Museo Madre, Federico Mollicone, president Commissione Cultura della Camera.

The public will have the opportunity to consult with touchscreen mode the new database of the Quadriennale Library Archive for an immersive navigation in its heritage on Italian art of the 20th and 21st centuries. The public will also be able to participate, on Friday, June 9 from 5 to 9 p.m., in a drawing session open to all, as part of the Scuola di Santa Rosa, led by artists Luigi Presicce and Francesco Lauretta, its founders.

The exhibition Dopodomani, curated by the Art Direction of the Quadriennale, will be open during the three days, again with free access in Room XI of the Great Mosaic, built through works that intend to define the feeling with which today we look to the future. The participating artists are mainly young people, involved in the last year of the Quadriennale’s activities, in its different articulations: Stefano Canto, Lucia Cristiani, Daniele Di Girolamo, Giuseppe Di Liberto, Irene Fenara, Federica Francesconi, Lucas Memmola, Gabriella Siciliano.

A special moment of the festival will feature students from the Goffredo Mameli High School of Classics in Rome, whose short film Quella canzone sei tu (19’38’’), made as part of the Archivio del Futuro contest, promoted by the Quadriennale and conceived and produced by Studio Merlini Storti to raise awareness among young people about the importance of historical archives as places for preserving memory, will be screened.

For the Festival, the volume Annuario d’arte italiana 2022, a new tool for monitoring Italian critical production in 2022, will be launched. The volume is published by Treccani, publishing partner of the Quadriennale, with which it also publishes the quarterly journal Quaderni d’arte italiana, whose new issue entitled #futuro will be available.

The Festival will also be an opportunity for technical discussion between artists and nonprofit spaces on current research and the possibility of new paths of production. The confrontation will take place in two workshops that will animate a pre-festival and whose outcomes will be returned during the event. The one dedicated to Nonprofit Spaces will see, among others, the interventions of Edoardo Aruta, BARdaDino - Venice; Christophe Constantin, co-founder Spazio In Situ - Rome; Antonella Genuardi (Genuardi/Ruta), L’Ascensore - Palermo. The “Cosmology” Workshop, on the other hand, compares artists Ambra Castagnetti, Marco Eusepi, Andrea Mastrovito, Agnes Questionmark, Arcangelo Sassolino, Giuseppe Stampone, Eugenio Tibaldi, Gian Maria Tosatti.

All three days will close in the evening with performances and DJ sets, always with free access subject to availability.

QUORUM is part of the program for the 95th anniversary of the Quadrennial on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the proclamation of Rome as capital city, for which the Foundation has received support from the Prime Minister’s Office - National anniversaries and national and international sporting events mission structure.

The initiative enjoys the patronage of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation | Rome Chamber of Commerce.

Photo by Marco Vagnetti.

QUORUM, contemporary art festival kicks off at the Baths of Diocletian

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