UMoCA - Museo Urbino di Arte Contemporanea all'Aperto

Under the arches of a medieval bridge in Colle di Val d'Elsa, Cai Guo-Qiang founded UMoCA, the Under Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2001. Site-specific works by international artists occupy the vaults above the river gorge.

Why it matters

UMoCA exists because a visiting artist looked at a neglected space and refused to see a ruin. In 2001, for the sixth edition of the Arte all'Arte project promoted by the Associazione Arte Continua, the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang installed beneath the Ponte di San Francesco a museum after his own concept of "Everything is Museum" — institutions made from marginal spaces reclaimed by communities, a family that also includes his Dragon Museum in Japan and Bunker Museum in Taiwan. The Comune and Arte Continua restored it as a permanent museum in 2022, with funding through the Italian Ministry of Culture's Piano per l'Arte Contemporanea 2020.

What to notice

• The museum lies beneath the bridge in the Elsa gorge below the Convento di San Francesco, where daylight filters through the arches.
• The neon "UMoCA" sign on the bridge serves as the museum's signboard.
• Site-specific works include Ni Tsai Chin's "Progetto per UMoCA" (2001), Jennifer Wen Ma's "Aeolian Garden" (2005) and Kiki Smith's "Color still" (2008), each created for the vaulted riverside space.
• The site's relationship to the Elsa river and the medieval bridge.
• The concept of a director, curator and staff applied to an open architectural space reflects the project's community focus.

Context and history

Arte Continua brought contemporary art into the Val d'Elsa's towns from the early 1990s, and Arte all'Arte placed works where daily life would meet them. UMoCA was the 2001 chapter: Cai Guo-Qiang conceived a museum under the arches of the medieval bridge that joins the town to the Franciscan convent, and the site has since hosted installations and talks. The Comune di Colle di Val d'Elsa and Arte Continua restored and reopened the space as a permanent museum in October 2022, with funding from the Ministry of Culture through PAC 2020. Loris Cecchini created a site-responsive intervention in 2023. The Ponte di San Francesco has crossed the Elsa gorge for centuries, and the museum turned its underside into a civic space.