ROME.- The third edition of the Festival of Foreign Academies and Cultural Institutes in Rome, this year presented at the MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, from May 28 to August 24, 2025. The project, curated by Saverio Verini, is promoted by the Department of Culture of Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, conceived, produced and organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, created with the collaboration of the Foreign Academies and Cultural Institutes in Rome.

The presence of foreign academies and cultural institutes represents a unique resource for the Roman cultural scene. These organizations, through their programs of residency and activities, bring a population of artists and researchers in a wide range of fields into the city each year; a community that crosses Rome and engages with it, creating a connection with its history and its sites, reinterpreting them while intertwining human and cultural relations. The Festival sets out to emphasize this bond, where the city becomes an endless source of inspiration for the fellows, reasserting the city’s international character and updating the legacy of the Grand Tour, which for centuries saw Rome as the fundamental destination for the completion of the cultural and personal education of generations of foreign intellectuals.

Conceived by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, the Festival of the foreign Academies and Cultural Institutes in Rome was inaugurated in 2023 with the exhibition Roma, a portrait curated by Cecilia Canziani with Francesca Campana and Giulia Gaibisso; the second edition, titled Expodemic, was curated in 2024 by Lorenzo Benedetti with Francesca Campana.

Sublime cliché is the title of the third edition of the Festival, whose exhibition sees the participation of artists who are currently in residence and others who have spent time in Rome: Terry Adkins (fellow at the American Academy in Rome 2009-2010), Iván Argote (fellow at the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici 2021-2022), Joel Blanco (fellow at the Real Academia de España en Roma 2024-2025), Bianca Bondi (fellow at the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici 2024-2025), Matthew Connors (fellow at the American Academy in Rome 2024-2025), Rebecca Digne (fellow at the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici 2018-2019), Esra Ersen (fellow at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo 2019-2020), Jenny Holzer (fellow at the American Academy in Rome 2003-2004), Christoph Keller (fellow at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo 2017-2018), Evangelia Kranioti (fellow at the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici 2021-2022), Hunter Longe (fellow at the Swiss Institute 2024-2025), Charles Mazé & Coline Sunier (fellows at the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici 2014-2015), Julian Rosefeldt (fellow at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo 2018-2019), Ruaidhri Ryan (fellow at the British School at Rome 2021), Giovanna Silva (fellow at the American Academy in Rome 2019-2020), Hayahisa Tomiyasu (fellow at the Swiss Institute 2020-2021), Nicole Wermers (fellow at the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo 2012).

The exhibition project aims to highlight the gaze on Rome of artists from different countries, who return a fragmented, tragic and poetic City, expression of a dizzying and conflictual complexity that in a paradoxical way simultaneously reflects its own opposing stereotypes, hovering between wonder and decadence. The exhibition takes shape through works created by the fellows during their period of residence in Rome or inspired by it, without failing to come to grips with antiquity and the magnificence of sites, or with apparently more marginal or anonymous contexts. The exhibition sets out to offer an unexpected vision in which even clichés can be sublimated.

The path offers a layered and visceral portrait of the city through works in which viewers can sense Rome and its landscape, its dormant but untamed nature, its self-deprecating humor and disenchantment, the ties to a glorious past that still allow us to find traces of monumental – albeit fragile – grandeur in the present. Ranging from installation to photography, video to sculpture, all the way to the use of traditional techniques and materials like mosaics and travertine, the works on view regenerate an oblique perspective on Rome and its impressions, in a fragmented, anti-rhetorical portrait of the city. The urban connotation of the exhibition is also underscored in the exhibit design created by the architecture firm Supervoid, which has imagined a display that evokes the countless stratifications and interferences of the Roman landscape.

A fundamental part of the itinerary is represented by the series of photographs commissioned to Giovanna Silva (formerly a fellow at the American Academy), who has made “portraits” of the various foreign academies and cultural institutes: through Silva’s images the locations and sites that host the academies ideally enter the space of the exhibition, gathering a constellation of architecture scattered throughout the city into a single context.

The Festival also extends into a catalogue, edited by Drago, to trace back through the entire project, with critical contributions by curator Saverio Verini, writer Edoardo Albinati, and art historian Michele Di Monte, together with images of the exhibition set-up.