MADRE, a community museum in the historic centre of Naples

In the historic centre of Naples, halfway between Forcella and Rione Sanità, you will find the Donnaregina Contemporary Art Museum, popularly known as “Museo Madre”, inaugurated in 2005 in the 19th century building known as Donnaregina, named after the monastery founded in the area by the Swabians in the 14th century. Formerly home to the local education authority and now owned by the Region of Campania, the building is used as an exhibition space based on designs by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira. 

Ph © Amedeo Benestante

It encompasses 7,200 sq m of exhibition space and includes site-specific installations that are included in the permanent collections, along with temporary installations, all arranged across the building’s three floors and panoramic terrace overlooking the vibrant heart of historic Naples.

Museo Madre is the Campania region’s leading museum of contemporary art. It is managed by the Donnaregina Foundation and financed by Complementary Operational Programme (COP) 2014-2020 Campania funding.

A testament to a region at the crossroads of all the arts aimed at documenting the past in contemporary language, acting in the present to help delineate the future, the museum obtained an additional EUR 6,000,000 in financing in 2016, among the great many infrastructure and other projects supported by cohesion policy, aimed at enhancing the operational efficiency and performance of the museum, both as a provider of cutting-edge cultural services of international scope and as a prominent member of the community.

Società Campana Beni Culturali (SCaBeC) S.p.A. executed the works and oversaw all aspects of project organisation.

The initiatives financed within the scope of the 2014-2020 Cohesion Action Plan (CAP) aimed at helping to create an integrated offering of services for culture and tourism, while also promoting local resources, included the exhibits The Show Must Go_ON and Per un archivio dell’arte in Campania, which, together, were part of the multi-stage project launched in 2013 that Museo Madre dedicated to the ongoing development of its permanent collection.

The first of these exhibits, in 2017, inaugurated the works of more than 50 artists in a collection made up of both historical and newly commissioned works, which also highlighted three important inter-institutional partnerships.

The second focused in particular on archive procedures, video and film production, and the relationship between art and space-time, while exploring the relationship between the museum and the community it serves by way of the great many connections between art, design, architecture, urban planning, and the socio-economic and anthropological change under way throughout the Campania region.

“To connect with and, most importantly, speak to our community, not just to industry experts.” This is how Laura Valente, then-president of the museum, described the vocation of Museo Madre and the need to promote a project of social inclusion for the film MADRE, produced in 2020 and directed by Luigi Pingitore, as part of the initiative “Madre Factory” promoted within the scope of “Il Madre per il Sociale”, during which more than 2,000 families crossed the threshold of Naples’ Museo Madre for the first time.

As a result of this project, the museum found itself prepared for the first lockdown for COVID-19, with the foundation launching Madre Door-to-Door, a digital programme to bring art into the home with never-before-seen items from the permanent collection and temporary exhibits.

The museum extended a call to artists, challenging them to reinterpret certain relevant issues of that time, including nearness/distance, home, isolation, community, quarantine, family, relationships, just to name a few.

In the same Neapolitan spirit of giving and generosity of the caffè sospeso (Italian for “pending coffee”), Museo Madre donated all its disassembled exhibit equipment to smaller museums and other cultural associations and cooperatives in the Campania region that could not otherwise afford them and that were also temporarily closed for the same reason. The first of these donations went to the former town hall of Orta di Atella, a building that had been sequestered from organised crime.

A museum that thinks global but acts local in the community in which it resides. An example of cohesion both culturally and, above all, socially.