Neue museen

Neue Museen is a 16mm film about the radical, modernist exhibition designs of Italian post-war architect Franco Albini and his collaboration with museum director Caterina Marcenaro in the early 1950s. The film is shot in the galleries of the Palazzo Bianco and Palazzo Rosso, and the Museo di Sant’Agostino, in Genoa.

Albini and Marcenaro’s desire was to literally ‘float’ art in the museum, and the film reconstructs Albini’s unprecedented and extraordinary hydraulic lifting and rotating support for Giovanni Pisano’s ‘Fragment from the Tomb of Margaret Of Brabant’ (1313). This device, which now looks utterly eccentric, can be seen as one of the first examples of interactive museum sculpture display. Along with a range of innovative hinged supports that allowed paintings to be moved horizontally away from the wall, it was installed in the Palazzo Bianco in 1951 as the focal point of the post-war reconstruction of the museum. It was subsequently de-installed and put into storage in the early 1970s and now resides in the basement of the Museo di Sant’Agostino.

In London the film was shown at The Estorick Collection London to accompany the exhibition "From Morandi to Guttuso: Masterpieces from the Alberto Della Ragione Collection", a touring exhibition selected from the collection of Genovese industrialist Alberto Della Ragione.

In Rome the film was screened as part of the conference series "Come sarà il museo del futuro? Lezioni di museografia contemporanea. In onore di Franco Albini" ("What will the museum of the future be? Lessons of Museography") at MAXXI, Rome. With Manuel Blanco, Pier Luigi Sacco, Philip Ursprung.

In Genoa the film was screened at the Museo di Sant'Agostino, where the Albini designed display device is currently stored and the Pisano sculpture it was used to display is exhibited more conventionally. The film was screened as part of a public conversation with Director Dr. Adelmo Tadei, and as an installation in the sculpture gallery alongside the Pisano fragment.

The film has also been shown at:

‘The Event; Other Voices’, Minerva Works, Fazeley Street, Birmingham, 21 – 30 October 2011.

‘Museum Show’, Arnolfini, Bristol, 5th November 2011.