The Floating Collection

The Floating Collection, group exhibition curated by Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni, borns out of the desire to study the rich collections of the Bolognese museums – the Settore Musei Civici Bologna and other museum systems of the city – through the gaze of six artists: Alex Ayed (Strasbourg, 1989), Rä di Martino (Rome, 1975), Cevdet Erek (Istanbul, 1974), David Jablonowski (Bochum, 1982), Miao Ying (Shanghai, 1985), Alexandra Pirici (Bucharest, 1982).

In preparation for the exhibition, through visits, in-depth meetings with the museum personnel and spontaneous derivations, several collections and significant places of the city have been turned into resources, in a “research platform” which is capable of opening trajectories of socio-cultural and aesthetic investigation. The “floating collection” is contrasted with the encyclopaedic and cataloguing perspective which characterizes the Western and modern museum model, by moving across the borders of the different disciplines without outlining standardized rules or interpretations, but asking questions, offering imageries and keeping itself open to continuous oscillations and variations.

The catalog The Floating Collection, edited by Caterina Molteni, is published in conjunction with the exhibition and is designed as an extension of the research on the collections of the Bolognese museums taken into consideration. The publication is made up of an introductory session with the essays by the curators Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni; a part dedicated to the artists with a text on the exhibited works and a collection of visual notes coming from their visit to Bologna as references which allow to visualize the research stage; finally, a chapter with three unpublished stories by Wissal Houbabi, Vaiva Grainytė and Lisa Robertson who, with very different narrative styles, broaden the reflection on the collections.