curated by Lorenzo Benedetti
in collaboration with Francesca Campana
Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome

Expodemic is the second edition of the Festival of Foreign Academies and Cultural Institutes in Rome designed to spread out from the Palazzo Esposizioni Roma into the fabric of the city.

The exhibition recounts the close bond between the founding and development of exhibitions and the history of the academies, both through the involvement of foreign artists currently resident in the city and through historical documents.

Rome not only hosts the largest number of international cultural centres whose intertwined stories date back to 1666 with the founding of the Académie de France, it is also the city in which the modern concept of the exhibition was first developed. For over forty years, from 1680 to 1720, Giuseppe Ghezzi, a painter, the Secretary of the Accademia di San Luca and the regent of the Congregation of the Virtuous at the Pantheon, organised a series of important exhibitions in the monumental complex of San Salvatore in Lauro, showcasing artworks from the collections of Rome’s aristocratic families and thus forging the concept of the modern exhibition. Thanks to his ability to understand his own period in history, Ghezzi made art public through his series of exhibitions, developing a modern and democratic notion of culture and, in effect, playing the role of history’s first modern curator.