Bold statement: Rome’s art scene just got a louder, more inclusive voice, and MACRO is leading the charge into a new era of discovery. But here’s where it gets controversial: redefining a museum as a living, city-wide conversation isn’t the traditional model you might expect, and it invites debate about what counts as a “public” space for art.
MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, located at Via Nizza 138, 00198 Rome, Italy, reopens to the public on December 12, 2025, under the new artistic direction of Cristiana Perrella. The museum adopts a polyphonic, city-responsive approach, aiming to generate knowledge beyond the confines of conventional exhibitions. The opening season, running through April 2026, pays homage to Rome’s evolving cultural ecosystem—a living, decentralised network where artistic, sonic, cinematic, and urban practices intersect and influence one another.
In this reimagined framework, Rome is not a silent backdrop but an active agent continually reinvented by grassroots energy, informal networks, emerging voices, and practices that stretch past the typical boundaries of contemporary art. The reopening also serves as a platform to tell Rome’s story outward, leveraging MACRO’s international networks to broaden the city’s cultural reach in this new phase.
Four simultaneous exhibitions establish a multidirectional narrative spanning decades, scales, and genres. They map a city in transition, exposing its structural forces, tensions, and the imaginaries it births.
UNAROMA, curated by Cristiana Perrella and former director Luca Lo Pinto, offers a broad snapshot of Rome’s hybrid and intergenerational art scene. Conceived as a cinematic tracking shot filmed against an “ideal green screen,” the show places more than seventy artists within a design by Parasite 2.0 that renders MACRO into a porous, ever-evolving set. The project unfolds in three chapters. Setassembles a constellation of new and seldom-seen works along a green axis traversing the museum’s ground floor. Live expands this plane into a full spatial apparatus on the first floor, hosting weekly performances, concerts, conversations, workshops, and screenings that leave material traces within the exhibition. Off extends UNAROMA citywide, inviting independent Roman venues to participate in autonomous yet interconnected interventions. UNAROMA thus becomes both exhibition and infrastructure—a collectively authored film written through distributed authorship.
One Day You’ll Understand. 25 years from Dissonanze, curated by Perrella, revisits the seminal electronic-music festival that, from 2000 to 2010, transformed Rome into a hub for digital experimentation. Through an extensive archive of photographs, sound, and graphics, the show reconstructs the aesthetics, architectures, and social dynamics that Dissonanze created across the urban fabric—from Pietralata to the Palazzo dei Congressi, the Ara Pacis to the Cappa Mazzoniana. Installed in two historic MACRO rooms, the project treats Dissonanze not as nostalgia but as a lens to reflect on the city’s capacity to host and metabolise experimental practices. A dedicated research day by Carlo Antonelli and Valerio Mannucci expands this reflection into a contemporary assembly with artists, curators, and cultural practitioners.
With Jonathas de Andrade. Sisters With No Name, Perrella presents a new film commission by the Brazilian artist, developed with Conciliazione 5 and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film. Rooted in research at Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso, the work reconstructs the story of a group of Brazilian nuns who, in the 1960s, merged spirituality, political activism, and social pedagogy, later relocating to Rome after facing persecution by the military dictatorship. Through archival materials and direct testimonies, de Andrade traces a transnational arc of resistance, placing these women within broader pedagogical and emancipatory movements while weaving a subtle geography between Belo Horizonte and Rome.
Inhabiting the Ruins of the Present, curated by Giulia Fiocca and Lorenzo Romito (Stalker), views Rome as a field laboratory for grassroots regeneration. This portion, linked to the project shown at the 2025 Austrian Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, examines forms of inhabitation arising from environmental and social precarity, foregrounding reuse, re-naturalisation, and shared governance. From Corviale to Lago Bullicante, from occupied spaces to community-led experiments, the show articulates an alternative urban epistemology in which Rome’s “ruins” become active spaces of possibility.
Cine-città marks the museum’s new cinema programme, curated by Sergio Sozzo and Sara Pirone in collaboration with CSC–Cineteca Nazionale. Highlighting Rome’s contemporary film scene, the programme screens works by emerging filmmakers each Friday, while Sunday screenings feature cinematic portraits of the city curated by renowned Italian and international directors.
Across exhibitions, screenings, and live events, MACRO reaffirms its role as a civic and international platform—an experimental, inclusive space where the city’s cultural energies are not merely shown but activated, debated, and transformed. Under Perrella’s leadership, the museum enters a new era grounded in dialogue, mutual influence, and shared imagination.
The programme, promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, and produced and organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, is conceived by artistic director Cristiana Perrella. It inaugurates her vision of a multifaceted, lively, and receptive institution in which the exhibition calendar is complemented by a daily programme that restores MACRO’s role as an open, accessible, and culturally vital place.
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