On October 19^th, the exhibition PERSONA. AEFFETTI SPECIALI by Makinarium was presented as the inaugural event of the Videocittà exhibition.

The event was hosted in the Curia Iulia at the Roman Forum, reopened after the renewed exhibition design curated by Maria Grazia Filetici. The exhibition itinerary, with artistic creations by the Makinarium factory for cinema and fashion, narrated the story of the joint creativity uniting artists and artisans in Rome, combining the old with the contemporary. The key to its interpretation was identified by the curators, Patrizia Fortini and Federica Rinaldi, in the theme of the PERSONA (from the Etruscan phersu and the Latin person), namely the mask, but also the isolated head which, as already shown by the great Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, in Etruscan and Roman art represents the whole personality.

This interpretation gave rise to the original and rather provocative juxtaposition with the Togatus Barberini (the statue of a man in a toga), an original marble statue from the 1st century BCE (lent for the occasion by the Sovrintendenza Capitolina-Centrale Montemartini). This is a creation of Roman art depicting portrait busts, imagines maiorum (masks of the ancestors governed by precise juridical rules), which were carried during funeral processions.

From this encounter the exhibition expanded and developed by exploring the technical, artistic and psychological approaches to the theme of modeling faces and “persons” (Gucci’s models), which gradually became more realistic, almost introspective, touching on hyperrealism, the alter ego, the mask that represents our unconscious, the irrational, and which is therefore already part of the world of cinema and representation.