FORMA URBIS

Forma Urbis continues and develops the curatorial path begun in 2025 with Forma Abitata, shifting the reflection from the dimension of inhabited space to the broader and more stratified dimension of the city.

Forma Abitata took shape within a hotel, a space that, by its very nature, is traversed, temporarily occupied, inhabited and then left behind. The project explored the relationship between artwork, body and place, drawing on the tension between matter, presence and space that runs through the work of Jannis Kounellis: the artwork not as an isolated object, but as a presence capable of transforming a place while, at the same time, being transformed by it.

One year later, the space changes — and with it, the scale of the gaze.

Forma Urbis arrives in the historic centre of Rome, in Via della Reginella, just a few steps from the Theatre of Marcellus, within an urban fabric where different eras do not simply follow one another, but coexist, resurface and continuously overwrite one another. If, in the previous curatorial experience, it was the interior space that was “inhabited” by the artwork, now the city itself becomes the conceptual framework of the exhibition.

The title refers to the Forma Urbis Romae, the monumental Severan marble plan on which the city was translated into signs, engraved and recomposed through the representation of its spaces. What survives of that map are fragments: portions of a lost whole which, precisely through their incompleteness, continue to evoke the image of a city.

It is within this tension between fragment and whole, permanence and transformation, memory and present that the project takes shape.

Forma Urbis does not ask artists to represent Rome. The exhibition deliberately has an open theme. Rome is not the subject of the artworks, but rather the place — both physical and symbolic — in which different languages, origins and independent artistic practices temporarily enter into dialogue.

Painting, photography, sculpture, graphic art, textile art, art jewellery, installation and video art thus become fragments of a contemporary geography: not pieces intended to reconstruct a single image, but distinct presences that retain their autonomy while sharing, for a time, the same space within the exhibition.

From the inhabited form to the form of the city, the curatorial path expands without interruption. The space changes, while the question remains open: what form does a place take when it is traversed by art?

On the occasion of Rome Art Week 2026, Rome welcomes these differences and brings them into relation.

Rome is not the theme. It is the point of convergence.

Ilaria Giacobbi