Reframing Practices
School Inclusion in the Museum: A Case Study in Parque Cultural de Valparaíso, Chile
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kata Springinzeisz
Between March and May, a Gaudi exhibition is being shown in the Parque Cultural de Valparaíso, Chile. There is an initiative by the Mediation Department to invite primary and high school teachers from the region to collaborate and design an interdisciplinary program for schools related to the exhibition. The goal of the program is to have teachers and students visit the exhibition and participate in an exhibition-related activity without the assistance of the Mediator of the Parque Cultural. If the program is well-developed and attractive, many schools will have the opportunity to visit the exhibition, which would make it a socially inclusive project. Furthermore, the visits wouldn’t be limited to the time and number of tour guides available in the Cultural Center. The project makes the exhibition available for more schools (including socially vulnerable ones) and therefore for a broader public. I am investigating and evaluate the success of this project, from the early meetings to design the project to its final implementation, and to see how museum workers and teachers can work together in a socially inclusive project.
Museum and Design Meet Humanities: New Etruscan Museum as a Place of Becoming
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ilaria Bollati, Michela Arnaboldi, Luisa Collina, Camilla Marini
Museums change. As sensitive organisms, they modify their priorities and relations between visitor-institution and visitor-collection. Museums are no longer only challenged to preserve their collection, but to make it available to visitors, and pretty unpredictable their tastes and choices about tomorrow. Moreover, technologies inside museums have introduced new time dimensions and new exhibit paradigms with high sensory engagement. A real case history - the meta-design project by Politecnico di Milano for the new Etruscan Museum in Milano - is the focus of this study. Seeing the audience as flesh and blood, and taking them into account, not as numbers of statistics and widespread dimensional analysis on museum consumption, but as people, with their own individual faces and souls, we has reflected on three main questions: What is the Etruscan Museum message? Who are its Visitors? How does the narration emerge? Following these research questions, we create two multi-purpose and orientation tools, useful for both the Institutions and the Designers: 1) a new method of analysis, cataloguing, and investigating not only knowledge (content) but mainly the cognitive process (how knowledge is acquired) that comes to life during multimedia experiences; 2) an experimental methodological redesigning of the visitor experience. Personas, and their polarities, are hybridized with new motivation clusters, in order to imagine four different visitors' behavioral modalities (explorer, atmospheric, collector, self-satisfied). The new Etruscan Museum in Milan is going beyond the usual reductive distinction between experts and non-experts.
Invisible Art - Redrawing the Map of Contemporary Art in Milano : The Art Content Is Wider than the Museum Container
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michele Trimarchi, Ilaria Bollati, Federica Antonucci, Valeria Morea
In the last decades, due to complex societal changes, city centres and suburban areas transformed radically. Artistic heritage can be a tool to strengthen community participation and transformation processes that lead suburbs to play a new role for society. This study discusses the role of contemporary art collections in the urban fabric. 'Invisible Art' Research aims at relocating neglected or inaccessible artworks and collections in the suburbs. Recently, Milano became the liveliest and creative metropolitan area in Italy. This resulted in an increased distance between the center and the suburbs within a complex and multi-cultural metropolitan patchwork. Symmetrically, a wide proportion of Contemporary Art Collections are hidden in private and public deposits, proving absent from the urban map and consequentially from the shared enjoyment of the metropolitan community. The research has identified, catalogued and studied Contemporary Art Collections in Milano, in order for their ‘invisible’ works to be re-located in suburban areas, outside the Museums, in places such as elementary schools, shopping malls, and underground stations, where people naturally gather and socialise. Results emphasise the lack of consistency of the cultural, commercial, and social maps of Milano. Finally, the paper focuses upon the expected impact of the Invisible Art project upon the quality of urban life, on its social capital, on the allocation of human resources and on the composition of its audience. The conclusions elaborate guidelines for municipal action to support this process and facilitate a more equilibrated presence of Art Works within the metropolitan framework.
Who Are Museum's Future Visitors?: A Research Project of Eight Museums to Bring Art to GenZ at a Major Pop Festival
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peter Aerts
Who are our future visitors? Museums might be facing a decline in visitor numbers as a consequence of the slow disappearance of museum’s core visitors, the babyboomers, and generation X. If museums assume their relevance will remain they might wake up with an unpleasant call. In the experience and attention economy museums are fading on the radar in the age group of 16 to 26. Museums will have to find ways to deserve attention, break through, and deliver something that matters, in ways that are in tune with this elusive generation Z. To do so museums might have to experiment with different ways of curating, programming, involving the audience, be eye catching, and activate relevant touch points in order to connect. To get in tune eight museums left their comfort zone to go where GenZ is: a major pop festival. We want to find out how museums can conciliate competing cultures of the scientific, high art and the popular. Are ‘entertainment’ and ‘edutainment’ necessary to connect with the future generation of visitors? At least that’s what we like to challenge in this pilot project to bring art to GenZ on a pop festival in Belgium. Find out what we learned with ‘Art United’, a research project in collaboration with the University of Ghent department of sociology and fourteen major museums, cultural and research partners in Flanders and Holland.
