Contemporary art has always moved in homology with what are the demands of our present, it’s always been a window on everyday life, a reflection of the transformations and sedimentations of the society we live in. By organizing itself into a system, which is inevitably economic, contemporary art has acquired the characteristics and the ways of production of the commercial commodity, enhancing the differentiations and geopolitical margins.

Geographical areas such as the south of Italy have often been excluded from the economic and artistic thought so often centralized in the Rome-Milan-Turin triangle. It is precisely within this marginality that, between the 60s and 70s, the figure of Marcello Rumma (1945 – 1970), the protagonist of the exhibition inaugurated at the Madre museum in Naples last 15 December, fits in.
Entrepreneur, curator, collector and editor, in his six years of activity, Marcello Rumma has redefined the ways of cultural entrepreneurship, relocating the south, especially Campania, within the Italian artistic geography. The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with the Lia Incutti Rumma Archive, is part of the research path Contesto1_MADREscenza2020 and of the ARCCA-Architettura della Conoscenza Campana on the creation of a contemporary archive through the digitalization of all the materials preserved by the Donnaregina Foundation for contemporary arts.

Curated by the artistic director of the museum Andrea Villiani, in collaboration with Gabriele Guercio, Marcello Rumma’s solo exhibition is outlined through the biographical reconstruction of his short career, cut short by a premature death at the age of 25; a non-linear reconstruction characterized by ‘impressions’, moments, full and empty spaces, physicality, presences and absences.

Before our eyes we find traces, year-objects that mark the fluidity of Rumma’s thought, his predisposition to cross the art always placing himself in close relationship with people and spaces. The first rooms that welcome us delineate the prodrome of Rumma’s thought; some flashes of his childhood and education immediately catapult us into his world, where art, teaching, publishing and social commitment are constantly merged. The exhibition itinerary, after giving us the biographical coordinates, focuses on the curatorial activity of Rumma, defining the path of the subsequent rooms in contiguity with the shows organized in Amalfi from 1966 to 1968.

Marcello chooses Amalfi, a place far from any thought on the contemporary, as the epicenter of an artistic reflection, such as that of Arte Povera, but also of the perceptive drifts of optical art and conceptual art, redefining a place, the medieval arsenals of the city, far from the institutional logic of museums. The first exhibition organized by Rumma, within the Rassegna d’Arte Internazionale di Amalfi, is Aspetti del “ritorno alle cose stesse”, curated by a young Renato Barilli, whose central theme is the relationship between image and space with whom he interacts, his physical referent. Therefore, not only the works that were on display at the time, such as those of Giosetta Fioroni, Tina Maselli and Tano Festa, but also all the photographic and textual documentation which testifies the relationship between the artists and the exhibition space that welcomed them, become fundamental in the exhibition held at Madre.

Moments of encounter and reflection, the exhibitions in Amalfi, which will continue in ’67 with L’impatto Percettivo curated by Filiberto Menna and Alberto Boatto and in ’68 with the seminal Arte Povera più Azioni Povere curated by Germano Celant, make up the backbone of the whole exhibition at Madre, alternating the works of the present artists (Zorio, Boetti, Icaro, Ableo, but also international ones such as Dibbets, Stella and Vasarely) with the video and photographic documentation and with the letters between Rumma and the curators of the reviews .

Following the exhibition path, which also offers us the editorial moment of Marcello Rumma, with the foundation of Rumma Editore, we arrive at what is the last room of the exhibition, perhaps the most atypical. In this room we find ourselves in front of a completely empty room, with white walls, with a single caption: “una comunità avvenire“. An invitation to research, to gain in-depth insight, to enrich the difficult documentation work on the figure of Marcello Rumma. The exhibition becomes, therefore, a work in progress, an opportunity for collective research, for discussion, an invitation to reignite the debate on contemporary art in the south, starting from whom, this goal, made it become the epicenter of his own life.

Stefano Pane

Info:

I sei anni di Marcello Rumma 1965-1970
15 December 2019 – 13 April 2020
curated by Andrea Viliani e Gabriele Guercio
Museo Madre
Via Settembrini 79, Napoli