Opera Opera – PalaisPópulaire, Berlin, Germany

With Opera Opera. Allegro ma non troppo, the PalaisPopulaire is showcasing an art form that is as controversial as it is beloved—and an elementary aspect of Italian culture. Opera, whose name derives from the Italian word for “work,” is a theatrical genre in constant flux that has always staged the process of creation, work, and doing through imagination and creativity. Opera reflects the drama of life and unites all kinds of disciplines, from music to poetry, from design to choreography, from painting to acting, film, and performance. Conceived by MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome and featuring thirty protagonists of international art, the show pays homage to opera from the perspective of contemporary visual art and architecture. A wide selection of significant artworks from the MAXXI Collection unfold to the public like the plot of a musical performance that fills the entire space and transforms the PalaisPopulaire on Unter den Linden boulevard into a real artwork.

Opera Opera is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total and open work of art, a fruitful place for artistic and interdisciplinary encounters capable of addressing theatre and the representation of the self and the world. In this sense, the invited artists reflect on the staging and on the representation of the drama of life. They investigate topics such as the body and its perception, the performativity of the artistic gesture, the spatial experience of sound, the theatre of the everyday, the masking of reality.

To give substance to this narrative, the MAXXI Collection—which is enriched by two new works commissioned expressly for this show—is transformed from a static body into a productive process of experimentation and evolution, opening up to an enlightening dialogue with its Berlin host and staging a collection that is not only a memory but, on the contrary, a present-day performance. In this renewed narrative, the PalaisPopulaire’s exhibition space also take on new names and new meanings, from Backstage (Gallery 2) to Prelude (Gallery 1) to Theatre of the Everyday (Gallery 3), to Stage (Terrace), thematic sections that, evoking a theatrical and scenographic dimension, host experiential and performance works, photography and video installations, architectural models and archival materials.