Eternal struggle of my desire is an exhibition by Numero Cromatico curated by Spazio Taverna for the Museo Nazionale Romano, Crypta Balbi – a project on the renewal of the Genius Loci through the contamination between contemporary art and archaeology. 

The artist presents a project that is scattered across the underground archaeological areas of Crypta Balbi, building a bridge between some unprecedented artworks from the Arazzi series (2021-ongoing) and the history of the place and its peculiar architectural morphology. The exhibition is designed specifically for the museum’s spaces and presents an itinerary that opens with a large-scale work placed in the site’s main atrium. On the tactile surface of the artwork is woven a text generated with the help of I.L.Y. (acronym for I Love You), an artificial intelligence instructed by Numero Cromatico to write love poems. Within the tunnels of the crypt, further artworks of different sizes are arranged, almost hidden, with textual contents that, as autonomous entities, address the observer directly.

Numero Cromatico’s intervention inside the Crypta Balbi spurred from the intention of transforming the archaeological site into a potential and multi-sensorial environment, capable of transporting the observer into a new and unusual exploration of the Self.