Elisa Montessori's 'Il sogno della camera rossa' at MUCIV in Rome

The MUCIV – Museo della Civiltà in Rome presents 'Il sogno della camera rossa', an exhibition by Elisa Montessori (Genoa, 1931), curated by Alessandra Mammì and Andrea Viliani. The show integrates Montessori's works with artifacts from the museum's Asian art collections and the Museo Preistorico Etnografico, founded in 1875 by Luigi Pigorini. The exhibition's title references the 18th-century Chinese novel 'Dream of the Red Chamber' by Cao Xueqin, given to Montessori by her first husband, Mario Tchou, an Italo-Chinese Olivetti engineer. Sinologists Pierfrancesco Fedi and Loretta Paderni facilitated the dialogue between artworks and objects. The display features 12 vitrines arranged as a wunderkammer, starting with Montessori's 'Paesaggio della Manciuria', a triptych presented at the 1982 Venice Biennale and acquired by MUCIV. The exhibition explores themes of lightness, nature, feminism, and environmentalism, incorporating materials like gold leaf, fabrics, threads, and found natural elements from Montessori's morning walks. Objects from the Pigorini collection include bound-foot shoes, belt buckles, cricket cages, and hair ornaments, juxtaposed with Montessori's mosaic fragments. The show concludes with her monumental 'scroll' works on catatram paper (Auditorium, 2007), blending Eastern and Western traditions. Montessori emphasizes her admiration for empty spaces in art, citing Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli as parallels to Chinese painting.