Reopens with an unmissable shows the Centro Pecci in Prato

Fabio Cavallucci director of the new Centro Pecci   says the new museum and the exhibition The End of the World

We met Fabio Cavallucci on the eve of the reopening of the Centro Pecci. An ambitious and fascinating project, an opportunity for the city, that he wanted and thought step by step.

A new building, a major international exhibition. The October 16 is an important moment...
Yes, it is a great challenge. But a museum that opens, or rather, like this, which reopened after extensive work of enlargement must represent the intentions from the beginning of his research....

We start from the exhibition: The End of the World.
In times of global climate change, the spread wars they did tell the Pope that we are facing the Third World War, although fought in pieces, Redundancy and uncontrollable migration, Brexit that if not around the globe marks at least the end Europe, does not seem too much talk about the end of the world: a catastrophic glance it would seem possible and, let's face it, endorsed by the events.
This is not the theme that the exhibition aims to address. This end of the world is not a catastrophic end, apocalyptic. Of course, there is also the risk that a restructuring of the political and social relationships as a result of the changes which have already occurred also involves striking facts. Indeed, unfortunately, it is what has happened historically in most cases.

So what is your interpretation of the word order?
And 'more a sense of detachment from the mind that we want to emphasize: the world appears before us as before, still looks like a complete and functioning mechanism, and instead is a fossil record. Because the end of the world, after all, has already taken place. Not the end of the planet, of course: it is the end of "our" world of perceptual and cognitive processes from ancient Greece to today have constituted the foundation of the Western system of thought, which is what global today.

What significance will this profound change for humanity?
As every age draws to a close, this prompts us to look back, to think back to the past, to the times of the planet that are immeasurably longer than human: the cosmic spaces, the light years that separate us from the nearest stars, the inexorable motions of galaxies, stars, planets. In these huge spaces and in these times everlasting, our human existence is reduced to an infinitesimal size. It's a bit 'as if we entered into the new building by Maurice Nio, a kind of spacecraft came from an unknown planet or ready to go for some kind of cosmic place, and instantly projected found ourselves to a few thousand light years away from Land.

And inside this ship...
On an exhibition area of over 3,000 square meters, the works of over 50 artists and international artists will lead us through a kind of distance exercise, which led him to see our present from afar. The journey begins with an installation by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn: A Break Through, a breakthrough which fall waste from another dimension. Once inside you you will experience the feeling of being projected to a few thousand light-years away from us, reviewing our world like a fossil record, far geological eras from the present time.

And from the spacecraft as it will appear this world?
The world we have known the origin of humanity today, our world, there appears already finished, and the feeling is that of being suspended in limbo between a now distant past and a future still distant. The end of the world is part of this limbo and through different nature works, often to cross, to be experienced physically, in a crawl space and sounds that follow, it will drag in a continuous motion, inevitable, a kind loop of eternal return that rhythmically us away and brings us closer to the present, offering us new keys.

She often speaks of two forces that generanno from this new space...
Yes, a centripetal and centrifugal ... we need to bring the public in the territory but also to root center to the territory. For this, in the run-up to the inauguration, we thought of another project, curated by Stefano Pezzato. A project that serves as an introduction to the exhibition and frame the end of the world and brought the works collected in three decades of activities of the center in some of the most prestigious institutional centers of the region: Anish Kapoor at the Museum of Planetary Sciences in Prato; the Central National Library of Florence, Remo Salvadori; La Specola, Michelangelo Pistoletto; Mario Merz at the Leonardo Museum in Vinci; Daniel Spoerri to the Museum and Institute of Prehistory Fiorentino Paolo Graziosi; the Normale of Pisa, Giulio Paolini.

The essential function of these works?
From each of the selected works of contemporary art springs a possible "world view", while from each area of ​​study and research where they manage the works derive possible interpretations in an unprecedented scenario in which art and science they return dialogue and to confront each other. At each of these places of knowledge we then requested a special contribution: the loan of materials or an intervention can relate to more general issue of The End of the World, presented at the Centro Pecci or published on the website and in the exhibition catalog....

We touched on another important innovation; a museum not only exhibition space, but to live to 360 ° ...
Maurice Nio has chosen for the new building a title strongly evocative flavor: Sensing the Waves, suggesting its receptor and transmitter function, able to capture and disseminate this time vibration. The Nio project also aims to promote the permeability between the Centre and its territory.

As has been made possible?
With the new entrance, the bookshop and the restaurant inside a transparent body on the ground floor, the Center addresses outside, urges curiosity, invites interaction, opens to the city, mediated by an experimental garden and a large square. The evening openings (in winter up to 23 and up to 24) summer, cycles of conferences and courses, the projections in the new movie theater finally going in the same direction: to create a strong link between the Centre, Prato and Tuscany.