CHEAP haunts MAMbo spaces to celebrate a 10-year anniversary marked by sabotage

The Bologna-based public poster art project arrives at MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna to celebrate a 10-year anniversary under the banner of sabotage as a transformative art practice. From Oct. 6 to Dec. 17, 2023, the museum will welcome SABOTATE with grace: an infestation of CHEAP at MAMbo: installations of works already made by CHEAP, part of the photographic archive documenting projects on the street, some translations of posters in atypical formats, reissues rethought from a site-specific perspective. It will all be scattered between exhibition and nonexhibition spaces, from public restrooms to the museum collection.

It was decided not to use the term exhibition, preferring the suggestion of haunting. In fact, they want to make themselves “haunting like plants, which find a way to sneak into public space by making their way into the unexpected cracks and crevices of the urban landscape. Infesting is also the feminism that we invoke and have declined in a project in the street: this and other works will peep into the spaces of MAMbo.”

“CHEAP’s posters have inhabited and haunted our urban landscape for ten years, expressing, with original and creative forms of public art, a tenacious desire to surprise passers-by with direct and effective messages about often controversial, and precisely for this reason necessary, issues,” said Elena Di Gioia, delegate for Culture of Bologna and Metropolitan City. “The posters have settled in the consciousness and memory of those who have seen them, even if they have necessarily faded with the passage of years and the overlapping of various campaigns. Important, then, is this initiative to inhabit and haunt all the spaces of MAMbo, which once again demonstrates its right cultural choice to open up to the outside world, as has been done previously with city spaces. Thanks to the encounter between MAMbo and CHEAP, a chance is offered to those who will cross the threshold of MAMbo to bring back to memory the posters they have already encountered and reflect not only on the proposed themes but also on the meaning of public art and the possibility of crossing the threshold of museums.”

“By graciously welcoming the SABOTATE project,” says Eva Degl’Innocenti, director of the Bologna Civic Museums Sector, “MAMbo continues the socio-cultural and creative path of museum identity: it measures and questions itself with the appropriative and interstitial action of CHEAP and at the same time affirms its specificity as an institution open to the complexity of the contemporary.”

“Every action undertaken by MAMbo develops around a reflection on its being a PUBLIC space, a central institution for a community and a reference territory,” added Lorenzo Balbi, director of MAMbo. “In this sense, I have always wondered about the meaning and importance of the barriers between ”inside“ and outside” the museum: if MAMbo is a public space (like a square or a garden), why should it have an inside and an outside? Why an entrance fee? Why opening hours? Obviously there are rules, collections to be preserved, workers to be protected, but we have always hosted with great interest projects, such as CHEAP’s, that challenged these barriers, these conventions, demonstrating how a contemporary museum must constantly question itself, proving that it is a living and adaptable organism capable of renewing itself and experimenting with new models."

Along with the foray into museum spaces, CHEAP has planned a public program of three meetings: Oct. 21 will see the presentation of the collective’s new book, DISOBEDITE with generosity (published by People), the title of which echoes one of CHEAP’s most iconic posters, in a dialogue with Maysa Moroni, photo editor of Internazionale magazine; on Nov. 16, the talk will focus on the experience and the book published by NERO edizioni Civitonia, with the presence of Vanni Attili and Silvia Calderoni; on Dec. 14, it will be the turn of the presentation of a manifesto on public art, created by CHEAP together with lecturer and art critic Fabiola Naldi.

The opening of SABOTATE with grace is Thursday, Oct. 5 from 6 to 9 p.m., with free admission.

From Oct. 6 to Dec. 17, the project can be visited during the museum’s opening hours and access arrangements.

Image: SABOTATE with grace: an infestation of CHEAP at MAMbo. Photo by Margherita Caprilli

CHEAP haunts MAMbo spaces to celebrate a 10-year anniversary marked by sabotage

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