Chi Esce Entra. A Tribute Exhibition To A Disappearing Building

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
 — Tom Stoppard

The building is no longer a mere container. Its chipped walls, skylights filtering soft light, and remnants of the dance floor — all contribute to a sensuality of silence and remembrance.
 The exhibited works — installations, videos, sculptures, performances — do not operate in abstraction, but in dialogue with what has been: with the old ballroom, with the bodies that once danced there, with the music that still seems to reverberate through the walls.

The title Chi esce entra, borrowed from Vincenzo Agnetti’s 1971 felt piece, marks that threshold moment when an exit coincides with an entrance — and every entrance carries within it a loss, an oblivion, a latent memory.
In this sense, the building itself becomes a philosophical category: an organism that sheds its layers, unfolds them, showsthem before changing its purpose.

Among the guiding themes are:

·       Cultural heritage and its fragility — the building as a vessel of relations, bodies, and identities that have inhabited the space;

·       The concept of active decay — not passive ruin, but a fertile condition for creation and rebirth;

·       The politics of memory — how art not only remembers but interrogates: official narratives, the margins of history, and queer spaces (like the 1980s club) emerge as latent traces.

To traverse this exhibition is to find oneself in a space between architectural life and death — a space that pulses, remembers, and anticipates its transformation into the new home of the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History.
 One becomes part of a suspended temporality: the visitor is not merely a spectator but an actor in an urban rite, a rite of passage. In this sense, the exhibition becomes an existential experience.

If we think of the building as a body that has lived multiple lives, it now stands in a liminal phase: the past is not a simple memory but a layered presence coexisting with the present and prefiguring the future. In this limbo, art makes visible what would otherwise remain hidden or erased.
 The title reveals that to leave does not mean to disappear: to leave is also to enter a new state — of awareness, of memory, of transformation. And vice versa. The paradox is as radical as the experience of the exhibition itself: there is no separation between ending and beginning, but a trans-formed continuity.

Chi esce entra is therefore not merely a tribute exhibition, but an act: an inquiry into time, into architecture as testimony, and into collective identity as an accumulation of stories that risk evaporating if left unexamined. In an Italy where many buildings vanish or are repurposed without memory, this project becomes an ethical micro-event: to remember in order to transform, to transform in order not to erase — toward a renewed awareness of space and memory.

You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.
 — Louise Bourgeois

Opening Hours & Accessibility
Via Gregoriana 9, 00187 Rome
Wednesday – Sunday, 4:00 pm – 8:00 pm, until November 9, 2025
www.biblhertz.it
Event registration: https://www.biblhertz.it/chi-esce-entra
Free admission

Please note that due to the architectural characteristics of the venue, the space is unfortunately not accessible to visitors with reduced mobility.

Contacts
Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History
Via Gregoriana 28, 00187 Rome
Mara Freiberg Simmen | mara.freibergsimmen@biblhertz.it

Lara Facco P&C
T. +39 02 36565133 | E. press@larafacco.com | www.larafacco.com
Lara Facco | M. +39 349 2529989 | E. lara@larafacco.com
Ludovica Solari | M. +39 335 5771737 | E. ludovicasolari@larafacco.com
Francesca Ogliari | M. +39 345 2101174 | E. francesca@larafacco.com