Fondazione Morra - Museo Nitsch

The Museum Archive Lab for Contemporaries Arts Hermann Nitsch is a study and documentation centre for philosophical, poetical and visual theories developed by the famous Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch (Wien 1938) since the last 30 years. A place where the Action relics of the OM Theatre (Orgies Mysteries Theatre), a Gesamtkunstwerk expression or arte totale related to the psycho-analytical concept of Abreaction, an emotional shock that allows a subject to remove the effects of dramatic events, his course between the smells and colors, the astronomical and botanical excursions take form in an experimental language still in progress. The execution of orgiastic and onanistic acts together with the staging of sacrificial rites (that remind both to pagan mysteries and to the Christian Passion) grant the cathartic liberation from religious, moral and sexual taboos. This space situated in the heart of Napoli, first conceived to host a coal-burning power plant at the end of 19th century, displays vast extensions, dense and laborious from a perceptive point of view, and an architectural body to be observed from the poetic angle of who has turned this abandoned structure into a creative compound: the Museum Archive Lab for Contemporaries Arts Hermann Nitsch, a flexible multi-functional space where to experiment a plurality of arts’ forms. The Museum Hermann Nitsch has been created through a process involving the analysis of situations, facts and criteria, both objective and interpretative, the substantial value of which has engendered a series of central cores:

• the Collection, based on installations and works realised by Nitsch, in collaboration with Giuseppe Morra, since 1974 to the present day;
• the Documentation, Education and Research Centre, organised through digital data, texts, images and events dating from the 20th century, forms a scenery in which descriptive, critical and syntactic contents open to future analysis;
• the Library-Media Library orders books, catalogues, critic texts, articles, reviews, magazines, monographies, interviews, conferences, debates;
• the Experimental/Independent Cinema Department collects videos from the Aktions made by Nitsch since 1970; it promotes and distributes the independent cinema, inquiring the themes and methods of historical and contemporary film/video makers;
• the Contemporary Music Audio Library dating from 1940 on;
• the Performative and Multimedia Arts Centre, digitalized and to be joined up to future archives, pertaining other sources or interdisciplinary events.