SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2014
A file picture taken on November 25, 2014 in Rome shows a painting on a wall of the Metropoliz Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere (MAAM) which is also home to 200
squatters, including Roma and people coming from all corners of the globe. — AFP photos
I
n a part of Rome few tourists ever reach,
the Metropoliz Museum of the Other and
the Elsewhere (MAAM) takes the concept of
the warehouse gallery into a new dimension.
Located in an abandoned salami factory on
the Italian capital’s scruffy eastern periphery,
the museum is also home to 200 squatters,
including 50 children, whose precarious situation is an integral part of a project described
by its creator, Giorgio de Finis, as a living,
breathing artwork. “The police could come in
tomorrow and throw everybody out,” de Finis
told AFP. “We have to be prudent. That why
we only open to the public on certain days
(usually Saturdays) and for special events.”
Despite the irregular hours, the museum is
becoming increasingly recognized as an innovative element of Rome’s otherwise recessionfatigued art scene. From November 28December 6, it hosts “Iron and Fire”, an exhibition of Paolo Buggiani, a contemporary of
A file picture in Rome shows an inhabitant looking on at the Metropoliz
Museum.
Andy Warhol who was part of New York’s Pop
and Street art scenes in the 1970s and 80s, and
now specializes in incorporating live flames
into sculpture-based performance pieces.
On the frontline
Culturally, physically and socially, MAAM
stands on the frontline of Italy’s overlapping
immigration and housing crises. Its inhabitants come from all over. Many are Roma, an
ethnic group whose herding into squalid,
overcrowded camps in Italy has been subject
to international criticism. And just down the
road lies Tor Sapienza, a rundown neighborhood where angry residents this month laid
violent siege to a refuge for asylum seekers.
De Finis’s vision is based on the encounter
between artists and residents and their joint
creation of an alternative to the broken model of society represented by events in Tor
Women chat in a courtyard of the Metropoliz Museum of the Other and the
Elsewhere (MAAM).
Sapienza. The concept has become reality
with help from hundreds of creatives, ranging
from recent graduate Andrea Rinaldi, 27, to
established figures like Buggiani, 81, all of
them working for free.
Yoda inspiration
“As soon as a single euro changed hands,
the whole thing would collapse,” said de Finis.
An anthropologist and film-maker with a
whimsical passion for outer space, de Finis
draws inspiration from Yoda, the Jedi warriorphilosopher of “Star Wars” fame who once
advised: “Do or not do: there is no try.” “At the
moment it is a story without an ending,” de
Finis said. “I can see three possible outcomes:
the owners send in the bailiffs and shut the
whole thing down, they decide to embrace
what we have created and take ownership of
it, or it all just falls apart of its own accord,” he
said. Hopefully, he argues, the first option is a
receding possibility because the authorities
would hesitate to destroy a cultural project
capable of drawing up to 1,000 members of
the Rome art crowd out of the city for special
events. “The art is a way of giving the place a
sort of skin that perhaps will protect it from a
forced eviction.”
Midas touch
Occupied first in 2009 by BPM, a radical
housing campaign group, after it was sold by
the relocating salami makers to a construction company, the building that houses
MAAM has a crumbly feel to it. But that fragility has also contributed to the cohesion of the
whole space as the artists have patched up