At the end of every semester, the Cornell-in-Rome program hosts a final exhibition for the city of Rome, displaying the work that has accumulated over the preceding four months. For us, the exhibition is a nice way of concluding the semester and of course, to have a lot of fun as well.
The palazzo undergoes quite a makeover as students frantically clean up the studio clutter and begin organizing the rooms into different exhibitions spaces; black cloth is draped over the exhibition tables and lamps are specially placed; wine and proscuitto are served and students come all dressed up: Studio had never looked so clean and refined…
Although all the work was really fantastic, I think it was the artists who took the spotlight with their installations, which engaged the viewer in a very tangible way. They had live artists, video projections, hung objects which you could touch – all lending their ideas in again a very tangible way.
What I think makes this exhibition so special is the three distinct but interconnected majors- architecture, art, and planning- which constantly feed back and forth from each other. There is a plethora of tactics to explore an idea in this exhibit, from abstract colors painted on large screens, to video installations, to extensive written research and analysis, to patterns constructed from fabric quilts, and to precise model constructions of larger urban interventions – all of which address aspects of Rome through the many different lenses of our program. This makes this particular exhibition both unique and also rich with all the many associations you can make between one another.
