Lorenzo Balbi on Making MAMbo an Accessible Museum

Lorenzo Balbi (Turin, 1982) reflects on nearly a decade as artistic director of MAMbo in Bologna, from 2017 to 2026. Under his leadership, the museum transformed from a mere exhibition space into a productive, critical, and porous institution engaged with the urban context. Key achievements include the repurposing of the Nuovo Forno del Pane as a model of cultural resilience and community infrastructure, and the enhancement of Villa delle Rose as a platform for young artists. Balbi emphasizes inclusion, responsibility, openness, and critical capacity as foundational values for a contemporary civic museum. He discusses the upcoming exhibition "John Giorno: The Performative Word" opening in February 2026, which continues the museum's exploration of performativity and media contamination, rooted in Bologna's historic International Performance Weeks of the 1970s. The show will feature a new Italian version of Dial-a-Poem. Balbi also previews the next edition of ART CITY Bologna, to be hosted at the University of Bologna—the oldest university in the world—opening iconic but often inaccessible spaces to the public, intertwining art, history, and knowledge. He describes his curatorial work as a balance between local and global, memory and experimentation, and sees the museum's identity as relational, built through collaborations and processes that connect Italian research with international practices.