Fondazione VOLUME!

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Saint-Etienne Metropole is happy to host for the first time outside of Italy and in a public museum, the Fondazione VOLUME !, from June 13 to 20 January 2016. 
The Foundation will present Steps exposure dedicated to the activity that takes place since 1997 in its historical areas of Rome. 
The exhibition will open on June 12 at 18:30 

A collaboration of Francesco Nucci with some of the most influential intellectuals and Italian artists, VOLUME! He begins its journey devoting to the free reading of its rooms through artistic creation. In Rome nineties, VOLUME! find a particular location, reviving the cultural context, as a place where artists are free to create their works through a complex system of relationships that trigger between space, work and experience. 

Steps comes as a journey through the history of VOLUME! which it takes shape in the spacious rooms of the Museum, through a village made ​​up of small "units". The meaning of this element is not only architectural but finds himself in a cross, and in the history of the exhibition space but also as a constant that has often linked the issue to the work place. 

Each book contains a trace of the work that the artist realized in the spaces of Via San Francesco di Sales, maintaining its uniqueness and its transience, and, at the same time, brings to the surface the memory that settles on the walls of VOLUME !. In this unusual occasion, every work enters into a relationship with each other not only in a spatial network, but placing itself on the same temporal level. This makes even more evident the main purpose of the Foundation is to be a place of total freedom, in which the artist has the ability to work autonomously, to change the space without conditions, to make plastic his idea, and offer it, then, to the public. The course, designed by Anomia study, will also be accompanied and highlighted by some works placed on the walls of the exhibition space, contributing to the total transformation of the museum. 

From the floor destroyed during the first intervention of Alfredo Pirri, the chaotic invasion of color Thomas Lange, the spirit of the Foundation has never changed, confirmed by the exhibitions that have taken place over the years. Emblematic are the iconic pregnant woman protagonist of the work of Kounellis, the rooms painted by Gianni Dessi, the alchemical works of Gilberto Zorio, signs and sculptures by Nunzio Bizhan Bassiri and those bright Francois Morellet. And yet the experiences of Pizzi Cannella, Mimmo Paladino, Gregorio Botta, Archangel, Joseph Gallo, HH Lim, Bruno Ceccobelli, Marco Gastini, Michele Zaza, Elvio Chiricozzi, Giuseppe Maraniello, Balka and Pirri, or the destruction wrought by Pedro Cabrita Reis, the work on time and the memory of Christian Boltanski and Fabio Mauri, the car burned to Costa Vece, reflection on censorship of Carlos Garaicoa and Gianfranco Baruchello, the home of Flavio Favelli, the Temple of Jimmie Durham, and also the studio space as a living body of Jaume Plensa and Sissi. Freedom is also underlined by the great difference between the work, the straw into the wall Olaf Nicolai, the tunnel Rui Chafes from small columns of Michele De Lucchi, the towers of Valery Koshlyakov, to the performative experiences of Santiago Sierra and Regina Jose Galindo. 

The exhibition, in addition to re-create the work of the artists, presents the testimonies and documents gathered in over 17 years, through the photographs of Claudio Abate, Rodolfo Fiorenza and Claudio Martinez and video documentaries of Giada Colagrande, Valerio Pittiglio, Dafni & Papadatos. 
The exhibition will be produced a book that chronicles the life of VOLUME! since 1997, with texts by Achille Bonito Oliva, Danilo Eccher, Lorand Hegyi, Lorenzo Benedetti, Silvano Manganaro, Silvia Marsano and dialogue between Francesco Nucci and Claudia Joy.