Provisional
Architectures
Twelve exhibitions. Twelve curators.
Bucharest/NYC — 2026
Founding Invitation
A significant strand of the platform's founding identity is the defence of formalism, not as doctrine, but as discipline. The conviction that a work of art makes its primary claim through what it is rather than what it represents; that attention to surface, structure, material, and composition is not an evasion of meaning but its most exacting form. Art that insists on being itself before it consents to be anything else.
The Programme Provisional Architectures is the inaugural programme. It proceeds from a single premise: that exhibition-making is itself a form of building, temporary, load-bearing, subject to the conditions it meets. Each exhibition within the programme is organized around one of twelve curatorial directions found in The Blueprint of Palazzo Vimana. These are not themes. They are sites. They invite construction, not illustration. The programme as a whole holds the formalist question open as a live one.
Over the course of 2026-2027, twelve curators are invited, each to organize one online exhibition within the programme. The format is direct: an open call to artists internationally, a curatorial text, and a presented selection. The platform provides editorial and design support. The curator retains full autonomy over direction and selection.
Provisional Architectures
The Blueprint of Palazzo Vimana:
II—The Encounter
III—Frameworks
IV—The Interface
V—Resonant Chamber
VI—Constellation
VII—Autonomy Within Relation
VIII—Selective Permeability
IX—Curatorship as Orchestration
X—The Viewer as Participant
XI—Recursion
XII—The Vector
Palazzo Vimana was formed, in the first instance, by a close attention to the work itself, to what painting, sculpture, and image do before they are asked to account for themselves. That formation is present in the programme, in the questions it tends to return to. The roster is forming primarily around curators working from explicitly formalist positions, practitioners for whom the aesthetic object retains its own authority and for whom close looking is both method and argument. A smaller number of curators whose primary orientation is social practice or transnational inquiry might be included not as counterweight but as pressure: formalism is only a serious proposition when it is tested against practices that have every reason to refuse it.
Each invited curator is offered one direction within the programme, selected in dialogue. The open call runs under their name and editorial position. The platform's curatorial framework — the Blueprint — provides a philosophical ground without prescribing outcomes. The result belongs to the curator.
Format — Online exhibition, open call, curated selection with curatorial text
Duration — Twelve exhibitions across 2026–2027
Autonomy — Full curatorial independence, direction, selection, and editorial voice
Support — Editorial review, design, international distribution, archival documentation
Direction — Assigned in conversation based on one of twelve positions within Palazzo Vimana’s Blueprint
Residency — Not required
Thank you,
Eugen Berlo
palazzovimana.com
Luca Lo Pinto
Curator & Writer — Rome / International
He served as Artistic Director of MACRO — Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome from 2020 to 2025, where he realized his Museum for Preventive Imagination, and prior to that was curator at Kunsthalle Wien from 2014 to 2019. At Kunsthalle Wien he organized solo exhibitions of Nathalie Du Pasquier, Camille Henrot, Olaf Nicolai, Pierre Bismuth, Babette Mangolte, and Charlemagne Palestine, alongside group exhibitions including Time is Thirsty and Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017. His programme at MACRO transformed the institution for three years into a single, large exhibition conceived as a form and place of cultural production, with works presented across multiple perspectives and fragmentary pathways. He is co-founder of NERO, an international publishing house and magazine devoted to art, criticism, and contemporary culture, founded in Rome in 2004. His writing has appeared in numerous international publications and exhibition catalogues. In late 2025 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Società delle Api, a cultural foundation established by Silvia Fiorucci, which relocated its base of operations to Rome in 2026.
Bucharest, May 2026
Dear Luca,
I hope this message finds you well. On behalf of Palazzo Vimana, I would like to invite you to serve as curator of one online exhibition within Provisional Architectures, our inaugural programme.
Palazzo Vimana is an international contemporary art platform, nomadic by constitution, rigorous by discipline, accountable only to the work. Rooted in Bucharest and New York through its founding members, the platform operates through sustained curatorial propositions rather than the demands of institutional calendars or market cycles. Its founding identity is committed to a defence of formalism: not as doctrine, but as discipline —the conviction that a work of art makes its primary claim through what it is, rather than what it represents.
Its inaugural programme, Provisional Architectures, proceeds from a single premise: that exhibition-making is itself a form of building, temporary, load-bearing, subject to the specific conditions it meets. Over the course of 2026–2027, twelve curators are invited to organize one online exhibition each, working from one of twelve curatorial directions within Palazzo Vimana's Blueprint. These are not themes. They are sites. They invite construction, not illustration. As the twelve exhibitions conclude, Palazzo Vimana will review the full body of work presented across the series. A selection of artists demonstrating sustained formal coherence will be invited to participate in a subsequent exhibition in a physical space, so the online programme is, in this sense, the first stage of a longer process of discernment.
We think and invite you to take “Curatorship as Orchestration” as a framework.
The direction asks what happens when curatorial structure is understood not as tasteful arrangement but as composition in the full sense. When the relations between works carry the same formal necessity as the works themselves, when nothing can be added or removed without consequence, and when the whole achieves something none of its parts could reach alone. It is a question we believe is close to questions you have already been working through, at MACRO and before it. The format is direct: an open call to artists internationally, a curatorial text, and a presented selection. Full editorial and directorial autonomy belongs to you. The platform provides editorial review, design, and international archival documentation.
Thank you for considering this invitation. We would be genuinely glad to open a conversation with you, and are happy to share any further details that would be useful.
With warm regards,
Eugen Berlo
palazzovimana.com
Palazzo Vimana is an international contemporary art platform, nomadic by constitution, rooted in Bucharest and New York. Its inaugural programme, Provisional Architectures, proceeds from the conviction that exhibition-making is itself a form of building, temporary, load-bearing, subject to the conditions it meets. Twelve curators, each assigned one direction within our founding Blueprint, are organising twelve online exhibitions across 2026–2027.
We are writing to invite you to serve as a juror for one of the programme's exhibitions.
The role is precisely scoped: to read the curatorial proposition as presented by the assigned curator, and to assess the submitted works against it — not against general standards of quality, but against the internal logic of that particular exhibition's claim. We ask for a written response, however brief, that can be made part of the programme's record.
We extend this invitation because your practice has consistently demonstrated what the programme holds as a working assumption: that the exhibition is not a container for works but a form in its own right — one that produces meaning through arrangement, interval, and the relationships it constructs between objects and space. Your tenure at MACRO, and the years prior at Kunsthalle Wien, constitute a body of curatorial thought to which Provisional Architectures is, in some ways, a structural response.
If this interests you, we would be glad to speak further and share the relevant materials.
With respect,
Eugen Berlo
Palazzo Vimana
palazzovimana.com
hi Luca,
I've been following your work. And love La Collectionneuse. The idea of a collection as portrait, of curating not to restore but to construct a new person from existing objects, that's the kind of curatorial thinking we're trying to create space for.
Also Big Objects Not Always Silent has stayed with me, the way you built an argument from Du Pasquier's work, purely on the terms of what the painting and the object were doing. That kind of looking is exactly what Palazzo Vimana is trying to hold open, the conviction that a work of art makes its primary claim through what it is, rather than what it represents.
Palazzo Vimana is launching its first programme this year, twelve online exhibitions, twelve curators, each working from a distinct position within our founding Blueprint. We're building the jury now, and we'd love to have you involved.
If this interests you, we would be glad to speak further and share the relevant materials.
Thank you,
Eugen