Our IB Visual Arts students spent the day inside the living architecture of MAXXI. From the moment they stepped inside, the space asked them to slow down and look differently. This was not a gallery of still objects. It was a set of encounters waiting to happen.
Students gathered in clusters, pointing, comparing, mapping the experience onto their sketchbooks. In another gallery, towering clouds of sculpted vapour rose from the floor, lit softly from within. One student sat cross-legged on the deep blue carpet, sketching in silence as if the room itself had paused to listen.
The exhibition 1+1: Relational Art, shaped by Nicolas Bourriaud’s writing on social exchange, unfolded as a sequence of dialogues. The students watched three figures silhouetted in a darkened screening room, sharing a moment of collective attention.
They stopped at Britto Arts Trust’s bamboo kitchen, where textiles, baskets, and sound wove together into a place of hospitality. They walked past television towers filled with faces, each screen holding another life, another story, another presence.
Throughout the museum, they found people lying on cushions, families exploring installations, strangers stepping into conversations. The students joined this flow, moving through rooms that felt part studio, part theatre, part community space. They noticed how visitors activated the art, how meaning expanded whenever someone entered the frame.
For IB Visual Arts, this visit had real weight. It fed directly into the Art-Making Inquiries Portfolio, giving students firsthand material for investigating artists who work with participation, space, and human presence. It offered sparks for new inquiry questions and new lines of critical reflection. SL students strengthened their understanding of artistic context for the Connections Study. HL students gained living examples of how artists choreograph experience for the Artist Project.
The museum became a studio without walls. Students photographed, sketched, observed, and simply sat still when the moment called for it. In a space where art relied on the viewer to complete it, the students learned not only how to look, but how to be part of the work.
#IBVisualArts #MAXXI #Rome #RelationalAesthetics #ArtAsInquiry #ContemporaryArt #MMIArt
MMI Art Expanded Classroom 
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