Exhibition Intro

With Opera Opera. Allegro ma non troppo, the PalaisPopulaire is showcasing an exhibition dealing with the Opera that is as singular as it is beloved—and an elementary aspect of Italian culture.

Conceived by MAXXI National Museum of the XXI Century Arts in Rome and curated by Hou Hanru, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, and Eleonora Farina, the show reveals the rich and complex meaning of “opera,” at once as a conceptual category and a form, from the perspective of contemporary visual and sound art as well as architecture through a wide selection of significant artworks from the MAXXI Collection.

The large-scale exhibition fills the entire space and transforms the PalaisPopulaire into a unique artwork with four thematic sections: Backstage (Gallery 2), Prelude (Gallery1), Theatre of the Everyday (Gallery 3), and Stage (Terrace).

Opera, whose name derives from the Italian word for “work,” is a genre in constant flux that has always staged the process of creation, work, and doing through imagination and creativity. In this sense, Opera Opera is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total and complex work of art, a fruitful place for artistic and interdisciplinary encounters capable of addressing theatre and the representation of the self and the world. The invited artists investigate topics such as the body and its musicality, the performativity of the artistic gesture, the theatricality of the everyday, the socio-political impacts on reality change through incorporating music and sound, taking the visitor on a sensory journey capable of recreating eclectic and participatory spaces where the boundary between art and life, between staging and reality, is subtly subverted.

Opera Opera opens up a perspective of European collaboration, in which the powerful artistic exchange that has always enriched the cultural souls of Germany and Italy is recounted in the exhibition through a shared narrative of peoples and nations, all the more useful given the uncertain spirit of our times. This uncertainty is also reflected in the subtitle, Allegro ma non troppo. In music indicative of speed, Allegro ma non troppo refers to the identity and cultural combination of tragedy and comedy; it is the tragedy of the present, the difficulty of facing today while maintaining an optimistic outlook on the future.

With poetry and audacity, beauty and irony, Opera Opera raises the curtain on collective history and our everyday lives, paying homage to the dramas and joys of life.