Jacob Komarzynski

The MAXXI is outside of time, it exists in a fluid continuation of the forever present, levels and spaces interlinked by continuous horizontal movement. The Rossi Project exists in a continuous and ambiguous recall of time, a partial and contingent existence floating forward out of the imbroglio of individual and societal memories. The ambiguity and the mundanity of the forms, symbols of something, speak not just to a memory of a place, but to all memories of all places. The intersection of the two tries not to resolve one to achieve the goals of the other but to find the points of coalescence, or contradiction, in which the memories, and the architecture of the city, exist in harmony or dissonance.

 

Not a total recall, but a partial, elemental recall, one that ebbs, wanes, and dissipates without a clear and coherent grasp. Sometimes a firm grip is found, and the object-thing is wrenched from its dissolute existence into the contingent present.

 

It contains height and width, but no breadth. It is merely a shadow or an outline, a quivering memory, just a basic shape sketched in the ether. The intersections are a point of conflict or contradiction, the odd symmetries coincidences, or maybe not. Moving through the chain of spaces, in plan almost rigidly orthogonal, the interstitial and the exhibition space become intertwined, the extruded history, hollow as it is, and the MAXXI, in all its monumentality, become one and the same, interwoven in a mess of frame and the framed. From this, the Rossi project can emerge.

 

The intervention is articulated in two materials, galvanized steel sections and plasterboard panels, both external, both internal. There is a “right side”, in this sense the clean, “neutral” plasterboard, the galvanised steel normally a quickly erected, light and cheap backboard for the creation of the white cube of the gallery. But in the intervention, there is no front or back, they are simply two sides of the same wall, with alternate affects. There is an expectation that one side is correct, but with this network of inserted walls, the spaces interlink and intertwine is a sense so that the two are blurred together. Further, moving through the spaces, the MAXXI and the Intervention are fused together through utter mixing, there is no longer an understandable language of material or form to identify one or the other. Through this, both the museum as a space of cultural hegemony, that which objectifies all that is within, and the MAXXI as a monumental architectural object, are diffused so that a third condition can emerge in its own right, the extant architecture of the Rossi Museum.