The New World: A Museum Strategy to Share Affective and Emotional Values

Workshop Presentation
Alessandro Zen,  Romana Scandolari  

“El mondo nóf” (in an Italian dialect: “The new world”) is a workshop inspired by a game that our grandparents played in the first half of the 20th century, when they were children, to make “extraordinary” a simple, everyday object. At the bottom of a small hole dug in the ground they placed an object taken from their pocket. They covered the item with a piece of glass and a handful of soil to hide it. The game was to “discover” the object, that is, to remove the soil and pretend that this was extraordinary. In the new version of the game, holes in the ground are replaced by wooden boxes with a glass top and simple objects are replaced by museum objects (such as replicas of artifacts). Once discovered, these objects are used as a stimulus to retrieve memories or tell a personal story. In the social-health context, this game was used with elderly people with dementia, residents of a Social Welfare Residence. At the same time, it was the subject of a technical evaluation to measure the level of participation, enjoyment and, more generally, perceived well-being during and after the workshop that ended with a museum tour. In a multicultural context, with people and/or students with migrant backgrounds, this methodology allows for sharing words and thoughts starting with a simple personal or familiar object, so as to trigger intercultural dialogue, storytelling and mutual understanding. Moreover, it is very suitable for assessment with the GLO-GSO evaluation system.