This lecture is a featured event of the Materiality of Resistance Symposium. 

The global context of the pandemic has confronted us with the necessity and the possibility of thinking about alternative models for the museum, which is now required to take a clear position and assume responsibility for the needs of the community it represents by sharing its available resources and spaces. These prerogatives have led to the creation of the Nuovo Forno del Pane at the MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, a possible new museum model: no longer a home for artwork, but a production space for artists, a forge for new artwork, an incubator for new projects through which to experiment with a more radical and direct museology.

The project for the Nuovo Forno del Pane is based on three key concepts, designed to overturn the museum's canonical "scheme" of action and present a "sign", a different model from the canonical one revolving around exhibitions and collections, more open and with artists and spaces at the center of the creative process:

1. the production of art as an operational and research tool
2. the construction of a community of reference
3. self-training as a shared practice of growth and provision of equipment and skills.

In the first instance, this model envisages a shift from the idea of the museum as an "exhibition" institution to one that is instead "productive", an aspect that sees a necessary re-engagement of the public in different ways, in line with the theories and experiments of various scholars and museums in recent decades.

Lorenzo Balbi is the artistic director of MAMbO – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, and head of the Modern and Contemporary Art department of the Bologna Musei Institution. After a degree in Cultural Heritage Conservation at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, he specialized in Contemporary Art at the City University of Turin. From 2006 to 2017 Lorenzo taught "Methodology of Curatorship" at Campo Corso di Studi E Pratiche Curatoriali, which focused on training young curators, and he coordinated the Residency for Young Foreign Curators at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, among other exhibiting projects.

This event is co-sponsored by CCA's Curatorial Practice Program and funded by an endowment gift to support The Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series at CCA, an annual series of public programs focused on creative activism.