The Power of the Display. Gae Archive

With a two‑part multimedia installation, Nora Ancarola brings to a close a research process centred on the Museum’s structure and on the architectural renovation carried out by Gae Aulenti between 1985 and 2004.

Her proposal grants access to the hidden core of the building’s construction and consolidation. The artist has filmed figures who move through and interact with the building’s mysterious foundations as agents of balance, containment and play. Through this exercise in transparency, she reveals the museum as a vast presentation device – a display – that structures our experience of art.

Ancarola understands the Museum’s architecture as an archive that accumulates layers and strata revealing its functioning, its hierarchies and its history. In so doing, she questions the division between the visible and the invisible: between the museographic space devoted to art, the spaces placed on view and the supposedly merely functional spaces, often concealed. A phenakistiscope – an early optical device and precursor to cinema – evokes the idea of a dynamic, illusionistic vision in which movement, like that of tightrope walkers, is what enables us to look, to uncover the enigma.