The presence of foreign academies and cultural institutes represents a unique resource for the Roman cultural scene. Every year, these organizations, through their programs of residency, bring a population of visual artists, writers, composers, architects, choreographers, designers, historians and researchers in a wide range of fields into the city; a community that crosses Rome and engages with it, creating a connection with its history and its sites, reinterpreting them while intertwining human and cultural relations that are reflected in the artistic output generated during the period of residence. 

The Festival of Foreign Academies and Cultural Institutes in Rome, now at its third iteration, sets out to emphasize this bond, where the city becomes an endless source of inspiration for grant recipients. The festival reasserts the city’s international character, updating the legacy of the Grand Tour, which for centuries saw Rome as the fundamental destination for the completion of the cultural and personal education of generations of foreign intellectuals. 

Through a selection of fellowship recipients currently in residence and others who have already spent time in Rome, the project is organized as an exhibition and a program of live events.

Sublime cliché 

Sublime cliché is the title of the exhibition curated by Saverio Verini for the third edition of the Festival of Foreign Academies and Cultural Institutes in Rome. For centuries, the Eternal City  has been a gold mine of visual metaphors, through which the city manifests its cumbersome and indecipherable grace. Rome as a fragmentary, tragic and poetic city: a dizzying, conflictual complexity that in a paradoxical way simultaneously reflects its own opposing stereotypes, hovering between wonder and decadence. Perhaps this is why even today Rome continues to stimulate lively curiosity, as a pole of attraction and influence on the imagination of artists. 

In Sublime cliché the city will be present and perceptible in all the selected works, without failing to come to grips with antiquity and the magnificence of sites, or with apparently more marginal or anonymous contexts. The show sets out to offer an oneiric and unexpected vision in which even clichés can be sublimated. 

The exhibit itinerary offers a layered and visceral portrait of the city through works in which viewers can sense Rome and its landscape, its dormant but untamed nature, its self-deprecating humor and disenchantment, the ties to a glorious past that still allow us to find traces of monumental – albeit fragile – grandeur in the present. Ranging from installation to photography, video to sculpture, all the way to the use of traditional techniques and materials like mosaics and travertine, the works on view regenerate an oblique perspective on Rome and its impressions, in a fragmented, anti-rhetorical portrait of the city. 

A fundamental part of the itinerary is represented by the series of photographs commissioned to Giovanna Silva (formerly a fellow at the American Academy), who has made “portraits” of various foreign academies and cultural institutes. Through Silva’s images the locations and sites that host the academies ideally enter the space of the exhibition, gathering a constellation of works of architecture scattered throughout the city in a single context. The urban connotation of the show is also underscored in the exhibit design created by the architecture firm Supervoid.

The exhibition will be flanked by a live program and a network of events hosted by the academies and cultural institutes: the main appointment is on Saturday 7 June, with an entire day of performances, concerts, encounters and workshops until late in the evening, entering the spaces of MACRO with a multidisciplinary panoply. The festival also extends into a catalogue to trace back through the entire project, with critical contributions by Edoardo Albinati and Michele Di Monte, together with images of the exhibition set-up.


Accademia Belgica, Accademia d'Egitto di Belle Arti a Roma, Accademia d'Ungheria in Roma, Accademia dei virtuosi al Pantheon, Accademia di Danimarca, Accademia di Francia a Roma – Villa Medici, Accademia di Romania in Roma, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Accademia Tedesca di Roma Villa Massimo, American Academy in Rome, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut, British School at Rome, Casa Argentina, Centro Ceco, Circolo Scandinavo, Forum Austriaco di Cultura, Goethe-Institut Rom, ICRO - Istituto Culturale Iraniano, ILA Istituto italo-latino americano, Institut Français - Centre Saint-Louis, Instituto Cervantes di Roma, Instituto Guimarães Rosa Roma, Istituto Bulgaro di Cultura a Roma, Istituto Culturale Coreano, Istituto di Cultura in Lingua Russa, Istituto di Norvegia in Roma, Istituto Giapponese di Cultura, Istituto Polacco di Roma, Istituto Romanum Finlandiae, Istituto Slovacco, Istituto Svedese di Studi Classici a Roma, Istituto Svizzero, Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut Rome, Rappresentanza Generale della Comunità fiamminga e della Regione delle Fiandre in Italia, Real Academia de Espana en Roma, Real Istituto Yunus Emre Centro Culturale Turco.