Il museo immaginato. Storie da trent’anni di Centro Pecci / The Museum Imagined. Stories from 30 years of Centro Pecci

The first contemporary art institution newly created in Italy in 1988, since its opening Centro Pecci has stood out as a center of cultural production committed to artistic research in the wider sense of the term. The exhibition is composed of three parts. The first, a timeline designed by the graphic arts studio of Sara De Bondt, narrates the sequence of exhibitions, concerts, programs, festivals and talks hosted by the museum across these three decades, providing a chance to map a sort of DNA of the museum through various materials: videos, photographs, documents, audio tracks, posters, works. The second begins with analysis – both statistical and semantic – of information from the archives, organized together with the MoSIS (Models and Systems of Statistical Information) of PIN, Polo Universitario Città di Prato, tracing a parallel and at times unexpected history of the museum. A story made of quantities: the number of works in the collection, the exhibitions, visitors, artists (a total broken down by geographical origin, age, gender). The timeline and the results of the analysis of archival data form a conceptual framework for the third part of the 30-year narrative: a new installation of a selection of works, mostly from the museum’s collection, selected by tracing the history of the most outstanding exhibitions held at Centro Pecci since 1988.