Interview by Christabel StewartPortrait by Andrea Guermani

CS Why did you take the job of running a contemporary art museum in Italy?

FM This particular museum is a museum in Italy, but it’s unique in the world. It’s not neutral; it’s a museum that collaborates with artists. That makes it a special place. You can’t come here as an artist and put something in one of these rooms without that thing changing and the room changing. There is a curatorial organicity: it’s a museum that does things to the work and absorbs the work that the art does into the institution. I am in love with this space, not just because of its seductive architectural features but because of this responsiveness, which is particularly relevant today. You can make a museum responsive by allowing for things that happen in the world, the audience, and the artists’ interests to influence the directions the institution takes. But this is happening in the fabric of the building. Even if these spaces are not digital, these Baroque spaces are resonance chambers; they allow the work to sound different.

CS Does that feel quite different to your tenure at the V-A-C Foundation?

FM That was a power station, like the Tate Modern. It was beautiful; there was a lot of development between inside and outside, and thresholds being made porous. The idea of the world influencing the museum was there, but in a different way. I always saw this museum as something special and unique. Now having worked here, and having seen what the artists are drawn to when they come, I can pinpoint the museum’s response to the insertion of art within it, as like a living organism. We recently installed Anna Boghiguian’s “The Salt Traders.” The work has never been as beautiful as in that room, but the room has never been as beautiful as with that work. It’s a collaboration between the building and the artwork. The installation is a sort of theatrical set of a boatwreck cut in pieces on what looks like a beach of salt, with big canvases attached to the ceiling, as if they were sails. On those sails there are different paintings of the trade paths that were used to move salt across the globe, or the same paths that were subsequently used by lineages of migration due to persecution, political positions, poverty or lack of resources. In Anna’s view, this is connected to the fact that salt, in ancient times, was a currency. You could transport it, and you could use it to buy things. Before mechanical refrigeration was invented, it was the main way of conserving foods. It was very valuable. These sails are coming from a ceiling which is half-frescoed, but half of it has been lost.

CS I liked what you said about Castello being an unfinished building. I like the idea that it’s not about perfectionism. Even if it’s a glorious building, it’s not quite all there, and maybe that’s why you, and artists, feel quite confident working with it.

FM It’s inspiring that the whole building was only 30% completed, but then still finished and used like a Baroque Hotel Palenque, but for contemporary art. It’s the same frozen gesture that most Arte Povera artists used as a poetic tool to trap energy into sampling, or showing a process that is not complete, and therefore making process, rather than outcome, the medium.

CS Another thing you mentioned, Francesco, was the approach to educating children or having children as an audience. That felt like an important aspect of what you were trying to achieve.

FM This is something that this institution has done since the very beginning. A commitment to education was believed to be important to create the audience of the future. It started like this, but then it expanded. Now more than 65% of the audience at Rivoli are children. It was this way before I arrived, so I wanted to celebrate the anniversary of the museum by acknowledging this radical history. We decided to dedicate a whole floor to children. We installed works from the collection appropriately for their height, and instead of official museum wall text, we left areas of the wall where the children could write their own texts. The children could tell the visitors why the art was relevant. Sometimes they explained the works well; at other times, they evoked atmospheres that helped and guided you to understand the work. It was amazing.

CS Do you have other similar conceptual ideas with which you want to tie the exhibition to the practice of the institution itself?

FM There are two areas that I want to explore in the next five years, though I am making no commitments. One is the idea of realism and what the ‘real’ means to artists. In the 19th and 20th centuries, realism was depiction. You could depict things people didn’t want to see, like poverty or social situations, increasingly realistically. If you think of realist literature like Émile Zola, or painters like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, it’s all about looking at what you don’t want to see. But today, because of what the digital expansion of representational media has done, to the extent that machines make pictures for themselves, and not even for humans anymore, I don’t think the accuracy of an image is what defines realism any more.  Now realism is putting what Pier Paolo Pasolini called the “brute piece of reality” in front of a visitor’s eye. He did it in an amazing way in his films, by not using professional actors and instead getting a beggar to play a beggar, and having the distantiating effect on the viewer who asks why he is such a bad actor. He’s a bad actor because he’s a real beggar. What are artists doing that is similar to that today? How do we put the real in front of visitors again? It’s not necessarily with images, sometimes it’s by unveiling how an algorithm works or removing the back of the machine. It can be abstract realism. It could be related to why machines take images of themselves. And where do they go? Those might be questions of realism rather than a painting of an accurate depiction. The other area that is interesting to me is the opposite. Mythology and recurrent narrative forms: how shapes and materials that re-emerge across various cultures are becoming prominent in artists’ works again. I find questions, instead of themes, increasingly appealing as a method of curating.  I don’t know if the theme is mythology; the question is: why is mythology coming back? It’s more interesting to think of that as the kernel of exhibition generation, rather than trying to present a thesis. .