"Art in the Public Space: A New Form of Institutional Nomadism", in Alves, Ana, et.al., Public Art: Place, Context, Participation ( Lisboa: IHA - FCSH/UNL, 2018). (original) (raw)

When does a place start to be an exhibition space? In 1986 Jan Hoet, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, organized Chambres d'Amis: an outdoor exhibition where fifty-eight artists exhibited in private apartments. The show invaded the private sphere of the city, leaving the perimeters of the museum. This historical example enables introducing a by now common contemporary situation where artistic institutions stage extramural exhibitions in “alternative” places. Indeed, in the last twenty years, one can recognize the proliferation of artistic proposals that exploit the non-ordinary aspect of a place to create a "spectacular" event. Besides, today, we also notice the multiplication of art centers, nonprofit associations, festivals, that made the alternative space an ordinary space, where sometimes space is inseparable from artworks. Through the deepening of two study cases, the Trussardi Foundation in Milan and the Nuit Blanche in Paris, the paper studies the aesthetical role of the place within exhibition design processes, thus suggesting the necessity of new vocabulary and a new definition of curatorial modes for the contemporary art.