MMMAC – Museum of Minimum Materials of Contemporary Art

The MMMAC (Museum of Minimum Materials of Contemporary Art) was born in Paestum in 1993 on the initiative of the painter Pietro Lista. The museum inherits the experience of the Taide gallery, which animated the artistic-cultural debate in Salerno in the 1970s and 1980s.

The purpose of the MMMAC is to disseminate contemporary art through exhibitions, meetings, publications, starting from the territory of Paestum where there are historical-archaeological values relating to its temples, the stratifications of ancient buildings, the landscape.

Paestum as a source of inspiration for artists, contemporary art as a new attraction for cultural tourism. To affirm this aim, the MMMAC has been configured on the collection of "minimal materials", produced by artists of great fame.

They are defined by Gillo Dorfles as sketches, doodles, notes, small predefined drawings.

In 1982, in TAIDE magazine number 4, he wrote a text, entitled "The return of the pause", which later became the MMMAC Manifesto: “Just today, perhaps, when it seems that everything is conspiring in favor of reason, the artist sometimes tries to escape it.

Perhaps, just a minimum quotient of irrationality and indeterminacy will still be able to form the seed for future creations; before the watertight bulkheads of lucidity, of absoluteness, have also extinguished the last echoes of what were once the voices of desire, irony, or anguish.

For these reasons, the minimal material – i.e. the sketch, the sketch, the unfinished, the embryonic, the magmatic – can become the true matrix of something more – and perhaps better – than the Opus Magnum: the Poem, the Statue, the Novel, the Symphony.

All the dross that the writer tears from his poem, or from his story; all the minute arabesques that the painter erases with the superimposed coats of colour; all the poetic, musical, pictorial rethinkings, which remain a dead letter destined for the rubbish bin, are instead often the only germinal intuitions from which the authentic work can start.

It is, then, in this interval between the still myokinetic moment of the gesture and the pondered moment of the construction that is hidden – not always but often – the only trace of that new, genuine, authentic tempuscle or corpuscle, of which we ourselves we hadn't noticed, but which constitutes the only authentic basis of all our subsequent creations”.

Map: MMMAC – Museum of Minimum Materials of Contemporary Art