bruna esposito
giganti miniature
hypotheses about the museum and notes on the carnival
The exhibition – curated by Matteo Lucchetti and Andrea Viliani with the scientific contribution of the curators of the MUCIV-Museum of Civilizations – is built around 16 proposals and projects that the artist Bruna Esposito (Rome, 1960. She lives and works in Rome) conceived during her two years as a Research Fellow at the MUCIV-Museum of Civilizations in Rome.
Approaching the daily work of preservation, study and storytelling of the museum institution, the artist conceived and shared her proposals – in their supports on paper, mosaic, and in their memorial entity of audio-video labels – as possible connections, thoughts, hypotheses about the Museum and its collections. Yet she did not develop them into real, finished and autonomous works, but she is rather allowing the Museum and its audiences to further reflect on them.
Esposito decided to inaugurate the presentation of this long and articulated research during the period of the Carnival, understanding how this festivity shares the same vision that led her to hypothesize her projects. The latter are, in fact, the result of a subversion of the rules that traditionally organize exhibition paths and museum working methods, just as the Carnival (from the Italian carne levare, literally meaning “to take off the flesh”, as the period preceding the beginning of Easter Lent, or from carrus navalis, the “naval chariot” of fifteenth-century processions, or from cornobal, the so-called “dance of the cuckolds”) invokes a suspension of the norm and conventional social hierarchies. The Carnival (whose antecedents in the Mediterranean area are to be considered the Greek Dionysian Anthesterias and the Roman Saturnalia/Lupercalia) is in fact the set of ancient traditional rituals of the end of the winter season. Through the use of masquerades, disguises and reversal of roles (man/woman, human/animal being), this set of rituals allowed, for a limited period of the year, communities to adopt and share liberatory collective behaviors – eventually reinstating the usual order at the end of the Carnival itself: a precarious yet true “upside-down world.”
The title of the exhibition highlights the oxymoronic pair giganti miniature (which translates as “giant miniatures”), written in lower case but with a larger typeface than the rest of the title. In this way, the artist invites us to reflect simultaneously on the monumentality of the buildings that house the MUCIV-Museum of Civilizations − architectural giants built for the never-inaugurated Universal Exhibition in Rome (EUR) in 1942 − and on the fact that they have become custodians and interpreters of infinitesimally small objects, almost miniatures of inestimable historical and cultural value belonging to every era and from all over the world. Esposito thus introduces us to an experience of the museum as a constructor of multiple and transformative meanings, as metamorphosis and even contradiction, both historical and intellectual. This dimensional and epistemic paradox becomes the background and gaze with which to interpret her 16 proposals: works which have never (or not yet) become such. They revolve around the potentialities and controversies of a contemporary ethnographic-anthropological museum, with a scale that oscillates between the macroscopic and the microscopic, the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown, the revealed and the hidden, the affirmed and the omitted.
The exhibition layout is centered on a dual, and contrasting, geometric figure. The first is that of the square, which recalls the Italian expression “fare quadrato” (literally “making a square”) that indicates the gesture of coming together to collectively protect someone or something. It is articulated in the four historical museum vitrines placed in the center of the room, in which some of the smallest and most fragile artifacts from the collections are kept; while on the sides of the room four groups of newly produced vitrines collect working notes, sketches, proofs, and simulations of the ideas that the artist has proposed, corrected, eliminated, edited, and reproposed in the course of her research. The second figure is that of the circle, activated by the movement of a fan hanging from the ceiling, with colored plastic strips attached.
Each of the 16 proposals presented and shared in the exhibition provokes a similar small shift, or reversal, of perspective about the role of the museum in its functions of historicizing and narrating the objects it preserves. One of the most fascinating themes in the artist’s research is that of uncertainty, symbolized by the tilde (~), which in mathematical language means “about”: an equivalence or approximation that indicates an uncertain date or period in the dating of objects. This uncertainty suggested to the artist the possibility of juxtaposing objects from the MUCIV-Museum of Civilizations’ Collections of Prehistory and Folk Arts and Traditions. These artifacts are not usually juxtaposed and do not interact with each other, yet in the exhibition they are arranged, in the center of the room, in the four showcases retrieved from storage: keeping as criteria for selection and equalization both their small size and the uncertainty of their exact dating. The cross-references that arise from these temporary juxtapositions contribute to their further, provisional reinterpretation, almost as if putting a tilde in front of the very objectivity of museum knowledge. Between the vitrines, a moving blade fan is almost embedded, underlining the circularity of time in these new diachronic juxtapositions and recalling the ongoing tension between the parts of a discourse in the making − but also evoking, and this is what inspired the artist, the need to drive flies away in a fish market.
Among the various hypotheses presented, all of which are potentially feasible and consciously unrealized, one has already been adopted by the MUCIV-Museum of Civilizations: the proposal for the donation to the Collections of Folk Arts and Traditions of a float from the Viareggio Carnival, one Italy’s most famous intangible traditions and manifestations of Italian folk art, known by youngster and elders alike. In fact, Esposito proposed to the Museum the acquisition of a papier-mâché figure about twelve meters tall, titled Pace Armata, made in 2023 by master Alessandro Avanzini on the occasion of the 150th edition of the historic carnival. The figure depicts a teenager with a helmet-gas mask, boots and cloak, painted externally with somber and gloomy tones, and internally with the colors of the rainbow, and thus the motifs of the peace flag. Among the many variants of Italian Carnival traditions, both ancient and modern, large floats are the main symbol of the Viareggio Carnival, that started in 1873 with a parade of gigs (later to become actual floats). Each year, a number of skilled artisans engage in designing and building floats depicting the most relevant cultural, economic, political and social themes of the current year.
Although in the MUCIV-Museum of Civilizations’ collection of Italian ethnography (heir to that of the National Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions founded in 1956) there are numerous parade machines, acquired over the years during the performance of the most important religious and secular Italian ceremonies – including, for example, the Ceri of Gubbio or the Gigli of Nola -, the important tradition of the floats of the Viareggio Carnival is not yet currently documented. Moreover, in the Museum’s collections there is already preserved a version of the official costume and mask of the Viareggio Carnival, represented by the character of the Burlamacco. Through Esposito’s proposed donation, a more complete documentation of this form of intangible heritage is therefore juxtaposed, testifying to its continuity and historical adaptability within the heritage community.
Musealizing this living tradition means, for the artist, aiding the institutional context to be liberated from its usual standards, precisely by overturning the usual relationship between high and popular culture, real and hypothetical, granted and forbidden, large and small. In the case of the Viareggio float, this also means attributing further value to an artistic technique which is only apparently ephemeral. Perfected in 1925, with models made of clay, plaster casts, newspaper and with glue made of water and flour, this technique allows the creation of lightweight structures that are set in motion and made to interact on current events with the irony and sagacity of carnivalesque behaviors. Similarly, the 16 artist’s proposals chart a liberating journey through the MUCIV-Museum of Civilizations, envisioning the potential ways through which its collections never cease to narrate ancient and new stories.
Bruna Esposito was born in 1960 in Rome, where she currently lives. In 1979 she graduated from the IV Liceo Artistico Statale in Rome, studying with Carmengloria Morales. She studied for one year at the Faculty of Architecture at La Sapienza University in Rome. In 1980 she moved to New York where she studied dance with Batya Zamir; she won an ISP Whitney Museum of American Art grant in 1984. Since 1986 she has lived in West Berlin, where, thanks to two IBA-Berlin grants, she developed her project Due gabinetti pubblici a compost. Back in Italy, she participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions. In the meantime, she taught at Cabot University, Temple University and RISD in Rome; later at the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila, Frosinone, Brera and she is currently a tenured lecturer in sculpture techniques in Rome.
In her career, she has taken part in the following biennials and international events: Quadriennale di Roma (1996, 2008, 2021); Documenta X Kassel, Germany (1997); La Biennale di Venezia (1999, 2005); Sonsbeek 9, Arhnem, Netherlands (2001); Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2003); Gwanjiu Biennial, South Korea (2004); New Orleans Biennial, USA (2008); Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador (2016); Biennial de La Habana, Cuba (2019). She has also received awards and honors such as: Golden Lion 48th La Biennale di Venezia (1999); PS1 Italian Program, New York, U.S.A. (1999); National Award for Young Italian Art, MAXXI, Rome (2001); Chamber of Deputies Prize Selection for the 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy, Palazzo Montecitorio, Rome (2011); 62nd Termoli Prize Edition, MACTE, Termoli (2021); 9th Italian Council Prize Edition, Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity, Ministry of Culture, Rome (2021).