CENTRO PECCI

In compliance with the new decree issued by the Prime Minister on 16 January 2021 which makes the opening of museums in regions in the yellow zone official, the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato announces that from Wednesday 20 January it will once again be able to welcome its visitors with full safety measures in place and with extended dates for the exhibitions and projects in progress: Jacopo Benassi. Void; Protext! and Lithosphere. 

Starting by February 8th, the museum can be visited also from monday to friday, from 12pm to 8pm. Admission it's free, except for the Protext! exhibition which has a reduced admission fee.

“We have already demonstrated how a place of culture can be an important and safe outpost for the community in a difficult period like the one we are all experiencing,” stated Cristiana Perrella, Director of Centro Pecci. “With the reopening our wish is to continue to send a positive signal of energy and hospitality. 

Our safety procedures have always been thorough: we are a large museum with big rooms and substantial external spaces where physical distancing and the controlled management of visitor flows are easy to implement. Reopening the museum’s doors to the public is an important opportunity to increase familiarity with the museum and the general services it provides, offering citizens food for thought and a form of safe social interaction and sharing at a time when there is great need for it.”

The museum reopens with the collective exhibition Protext! When fabric becomes a manifesto, extended until 14 March: featuring work by Pia Camil, Otobong Kkanga, Vladislav Shapovalov, Tschabalala Self, Marinella Senatore, Serapis Maritime and Güneş Terkol, the exhibition explores the role of fabric not only in critical debates about work, identity and environmental change, but also as a medium par excellence in representing dissent. On the occasion of the reopening a Nero Editions publication in two volumes will be available: the exhibition catalogue with a critical text by the curators Camilla Mozzato and Marta Papini, interviews with the artists, biographies and photographs of the works, and a second volume, a genuine artist's book by Marinella Senatore, introduced by Cristiana Perrella, Director of the Centro Pecci. 

The Lithosphere project will also be open – extended until 18 April – which places the video A Fragmented World (2016) by Elena Mazzi and Sara Tirelli in dialogue with the environmental installation Productive (2018-2019) by Giorgio Andreotta Calò: two projects that stem from the desire to represent the forces and materials that have shaped our planet over the course of geological eras. The exhibition of the new acquisition RAID, a video by Marcello Maloberti, will also continue until 15 february. 

Due to great public and critical success, it was also decided to extend Jacopo Benassi. Void, the first solo exhibition in a museum dedicated to the Ligurian photographer, until 28 february.  The reopening of the exhibition, accompanied by publication of the book FAGS, is an opportunity to relaunch the fundraising campaign: purchase of a limited edition photograph by Benassi will support the activities of the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci. 

The digital programme PECCI ON will continue in parallel to the physical reopening of the museum's rooms. This programme has been created to foster critical thinking and exchange within the global cultural scene, but it is also a way to highlight how a contemporary art institution like Centro Pecci has the vocation and can act as a catalyst for its community, an antenna that captures the present by attracting ideas, voices and artists to interpret the evolutions of our time and return them amplified to the territory and the world. 

On the occasion of the reopening, for EXTRA FLAGS, a new flag by Jeremy Deller (London, 1966) will be hung on the flagpole in front of the Centro. Entitled A Flag for a New Pangolin Nation, the flag bears what the artist considers to be perhaps the most persecuted animal in the world, indicated by some research centres as the likely intermediate host that enabled the Covid-19 virus to jump from a bat to humans. Dedicating a flag to it means dedicating it to a scapegoat, an unwitting victim, but it is also a sarcastic comment on the nationalist and populist political exploitation generated by the pandemic. As always in his work, here too Deller generates a transversal dialogue that short-circuits between opposite meanings, creating an image that is ironic and provocative at the same time and that reveals the suppression of our systems of coexistence and expression. Despite his unconventional and controversial approach, the artist has become an icon of British art, winning the prestigious Turner Prize in 2004 and representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2019, the Centro Pecci exhibited his project Wiltshire Before Christ, created in collaboration with the streetwear brand Aries and the photographer David Sims.

To strengthen the link with Prato also in these difficult times, from February Centro Pecci will launch a promotion with restaurants in the city: the coupon, distributed in collaborating restaurants, will entitle the holder to one free admission for each ticket bought for the Protext! exhibition.