Ai Weiwei returns to Italy with an exhibition on earthquakes: from Sichuan to L’Aquila

 At MAXXI L’Aquila, “Aftershock” brings the Sichuan and Abruzzo earthquakes into dialogue: around seventy works exploring how fractures—political, human, and material—continue to reverberate over time. 

There is no material that Ai Weiwei has not transformed over time into a political message: steel, porcelain, marble, toy bricks, life jackets, everyday objects. 

And in “Aftershock”, the exhibition with which the Chinese artist returns to Italy — more specifically to MAXXI L’Aquila — these materials come together as an archive of shocks: often open, never fully resolved fractures that traverse bodies, cities, and memory.