MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome reopens with a refreshed outlook and a renewed artistic direction under Cristiana Perrella. Located at Via Nizza 138 in Rome, MACRO resumes public access on December 12, 2025, presenting a flexible, city-responsive institution that aims to generate knowledge beyond traditional exhibitions. The inaugural program, running through April 2026, honors Rome’s evolving cultural landscape as a living, decentralised ecosystem where artistic, sonic, cinematic, and urban practices intersect and influence one another.
Rather than treating Rome as a passive backdrop, the program positions the city as an active participant, continually reinventing itself through bottom-up energy, informal networks, emerging voices, and practices that push beyond conventional art boundaries. The reopening serves as a chance to tell Rome’s story not only for its residents but also for international audiences, leveraging MACRO’s global connections in this new era.
Four exhibitions launch simultaneously, forming a multidirectional narrative that spans decades, scales, and modalities. Together, they chart a city in transition—its creative structures, tensions, and the imaginaries it generates.
UNAROMA, overseen by Cristiana Perrella and former director Luca Lo Pinto, offers a wide-ranging portrait of Rome’s contemporary art scene, marked by hybridity and intergenerational collaboration. conceived as a cinematic tracking shot through an “ideal green screen,” the show gathers more than seventy artists within a design by Parasite 2.0 that renders MACRO into a porous, ever-evolving set. The project unfolds in three chapters. Setassembles a constellation of new and rarely seen works along a green axis that threads the museum’s ground floor. Live expands this plane into a full spatial apparatus on the first floor, hosting weekly performances, concerts, conversations, workshops, and screenings that leave tangible traces within the exhibition. Off extends UNAROMA citywide, inviting independent Roman spaces to contribute autonomous yet interconnected interventions. UNAROMA thus becomes both exhibition and infrastructure—a collectively authored film crafted through distributed authorship.
One Day You’ll Understand. 25 Years from Dissonanze revisits the landmark electronic-music festival that, from 2000 to 2010, transformed Rome into a hub of digital experimentation. Through an extensive archive—photographs, sound recordings, and graphics—the exhibition reconstructs the aesthetics, architectures, and social networks Dissonanza fostered across the city, from Pietralata to the Palazzo dei Congressi, from the Ara Pacis to the Cappa Mazzoniana. Installed in two historic MACRO rooms, the project uses Dissonanza not as nostalgia but as a lens to consider the city’s capacity to host and metabolize experimental practices. A dedicated research day by Carlo Antonelli and Valerio Mannucci extends this reflection into a contemporary assembly with artists, curators, and cultural practitioners.
With Jonathas de Andrade. Sisters With No Name, Perrella presents a new film commission by the Brazilian artist, developed with Conciliazione 5 and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film. Emerging from research at Fondazione Lelio e Lisli Basso, the work traces the story of a group of Brazilian nuns who in the 1960s fused spirituality, political activism, and social pedagogy, later relocating to Rome after persecution by the military dictatorship. Through archival materials and firsthand testimonies, de Andrade maps a transnational path of resistance, placing these women within broader pedagogical and emancipatory movements while highlighting a geography linking Belo Horizonte and Rome.
Inhabiting the Ruins of the Present, curated by Giulia Fiocca and Lorenzo Romito (Stalker), considers Rome as a laboratory for grassroots renewal. Part of the project presented at the 2025 Austrian Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, the show examines new forms of inhabitation arising from environmental and social precarity, foregrounding reuse, re-naturalisation, and shared governance. From Corviale to Lago Bullicante, from occupied spaces to community-led experiments, it presents an alternative urban epistemology in which Rome’s “ruins” become active sites of possibility.
The reopening also introduces Cine-città, the museum’s new cinema program curated by Sergio Sozzo and Sara Pirone in collaboration with CSC–Cineteca Nazionale. Focusing on Rome’s contemporary film scene, the program screens works by emerging filmmakers each Friday, while Sunday screenings offer cinematic portraits of the city chosen by renowned Italian and international directors.
Across exhibitions, screenings, and live events, MACRO reaffirms its role as a civic and international platform—an experimental, inclusive space where the city’s cultural energies are not merely displayed but activated, negotiated, and transformed. Under Perrella’s leadership, the museum enters a new chapter rooted in dialogue, mutual exchange, and shared imagination.
Promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, and produced and organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, the program embodies Perrella’s vision of a dynamic, welcoming, and responsive institution. It pairs an active exhibition calendar with a daily program designed to reinforce MACRO’s status as an open, accessible, and culturally vital venue.
