Three Artists, One Future: the MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE Speaks Female
Last Friday, Italian art wrote another chapter at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris the other evening. More than just a celebration, it was an incursion — elegant, lucid, and a little subversive. On stage was the fifth edition of the MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE, the award that for ten years has united the museum and the Roman maison in support of the new frontiers of contemporary art. This time, though, something shifted. The three finalists — Chiara Bersani, Adji Dieye, and Margherita Moscardini — form an all-female trio. Three visions, three postures of the present, three ways to shift the axis of discourse: the body, memory, and space.
The Parisian atmosphere was one of quiet debuts that carried the taste of change. Welcoming the guests were Maria Emanuela Bruni, President of the MAXXI Foundation, Matteo Morbidi, Director of the Bvlgari Foundation, and Francesco Stocchi, Artistic Director of MAXXI. The evening opened with a warm introduction by Stefano Questioli, who shared greetings on behalf of Director Antonio Calbi. Bruni spoke of art as an identity language, capable of “imagining tomorrow” — a phrase that, in a city like Paris, sounds like a cultural statement. Morbidi highlighted how the prize, now under the aegis of the Fondazione Bvlgari, represents a continued and concrete commitment to Italian creativity. Stocchi, for his part, added: “The MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE is a living platform — it doesn’t capture, it accelerates change.”
In the room were two of the three finalists — Adji Dieye and Margherita Moscardini. Dieye, born in Milan and raised between two continents, dismantles colonial narratives through the lens of photography — a tool of partial, fragile truth, and therefore all the more real. Moscardini, instead, works with space as a political body: she rewrites boundaries and questions the very right to inhabit. Absent was Chiara Bersani, busy debuting her new performance Michel, the Animals I Am, yet she hovered in the air as a symbol of a body that doesn’t ask for permission. Her “gentle unicorn” remains the manifesto of an anarchic, necessary aesthetic.
In 2026, their site-specific works will arrive at the MAXXI in a show curated by Giulia Ferracci. There — perhaps — we’ll understand what it really means to speak of Italian art today: a territory in transformation, where language becomes body, the body becomes politics, and politics — finally — is female.
Text: Germano D’Acquisto
Photos: Ayka Lux and Niccolò Campita
