Museum life doesn't end when it closes its doors: here's the schedule for Prato's Pecci

A rich schedule of online events to stay ... open during the closure of museums imposed by the dpcm. This is the proposal of the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato, which shifts its activities todigital platforms, integrating the temporarily suspended exhibition offerings, and gives life, starting Nov. 10, to the new Pecci ON program, which presents ONline appointments and ONair live streaming conversations on the museum’s website and social networks, alternating new formats with established initiatives that have long been part of the Center’s program. Symbolically signifying the continuation of the Pecci Center’s activities, the EXTRA FLAGS project returns: every Monday a new artist flag will be hoisted ONsite on the flagpole in front of the museum.

Pecci ON intends to emphasize how the life of a contemporary art museum does not shut down the moment its doors are physically closed. On the contrary, today more than ever its role as a catalyst for its community, as an antenna that captures the present by attracting ideas, voices, and artists to read the evolutions of our time and then return them amplified to the territory and the world, is fundamental. Thus, weekly, Tuesday through Thursday, Pecci ON will present its ONair events. Every Tuesday, two new formats conceived by the Pecci Center will alternate in live streaming, free and open to all: #Museum2b, from Tuesday, November 17, and #KeyWords. Words that open the present, from Tuesday, November 24.

#Museum2b is a series of meetings that will bring together leading figures on the international scene (museum directors, curators, practitioners and professionals in the museum field) to question the role of cultural institutions in a moment of strong change such as the one we are experiencing. What is the role of a museum today, especially a contemporary art museum? How is it changing? What must the museum of tomorrow look like in order to respond to the needs of its territory and its target communities? Questions of this kind will be the starting point for reflections that will find space in an open discussion platform, designed with the aim not so much to find easy answers as to activate a process of listening to and analyzing the new needs of a rapidly changing world.

#KeyWords. Words that open the present, on the other hand, is a dialogue between art and psychology: the format that was born from the collaboration between the Pecci Center and LabCom - Research and Action for Psychosocial Wellbeing, an academic spin-off of the University of Florence, to address in an open way the individual and collective challenges imposed by the present, starting from the need to understand and share the difficulties that each of us is encountering, both on a personal and social level. Crisis and uncertainty are the two aspects that most characterize our vision of the present moment and the immediate future: a combination that generates in us a sense of helplessness in which the prolonged state of waiting that we are experiencing is not perceived as “resistance” but rather as “survival,” similar to that of a castaway in a windless sea. If, as Viktor Frankl indicates, man is “in search of meaning,” then the emptiness of uncertainty can be filled by confrontation, reflection, and the dialogical encounter of ideas and experiences. #KeyWords starts from these considerations by focusing on the museum as a place that gathers around it a community not only physical, but also symbolic (of the museum itself, of art, culture and science) that will host thinkers, artists, scholars in a dialogue for and with listeners on themes that accompany man in this historical moment, starting from some key words such as trauma, limit, trust.

And again, every Wednesday the #PecciSchool events titled The Art of a Changing World (1989-2001) will return: a series of meetings on contemporary art from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the new millennium, open free of charge to students and for a minimal fee to the general public. Every Thursday, on the other hand, it will be the turn of #PecciBooks book and catalog presentations, or conversations with artists to learn more about current exhibitions in #PecciArtistTalk. Completing the Pecci Center’s offerings will be ONline content: on the one hand, new materials will enrich Web Tv (the museum’s digital platform for in-depth analysis and research, which for the past four years has been collecting multiple video contents related to exhibitions, collections, talks, performances, concerts and all the artistic activities curated by the Center), and on the other hand, the very rich programming of Pecci Cinema, which will stream daily on the museum’s website a wide selection of first-run films at different times of the day: starting with the 11 a.m. matinee.00, followed by afternoon screenings at 4 p.m. and 6:15 p.m., until the evening prime time at 9:15 p.m.

Finally, as anticipated, outside the museum returns EXTRA FLAGS, the artist flags project born during last spring’s lockdown: each week the Pecci Center commissioned a flag from a different artist so that it could be hoisted on the flagpole in front of the Center as a physical signal of vitality and resistance. Now, as then, the Pecci Center wants ONsite to give a tangible sign of presence, mediated by the artists’ gaze: a real message to respond to the emergency and reflect on the extraordinary and complex moment we are living. Opening this new chapter of EXTRA FLAGS will be the street artist, illustrator and artist MP5, with the flag Third Eye - Third Eye. MP5 is known for her incisive black-and-white drawing style, which she uses in numerous different media. Her images shape contemporary myths that underlie a critical and politically engaged view of reality. Strongly active in the underground and counterculture scene throughout Europe, MP5 over the past decade has closely linked her work especially to the queer and feminist scene. Third Eye - Third Eye places at the center of the flag a female figure depicted while covering her eyes with one hand. “The image I designed for the Pecci Center,” the artist declares, “is a celebration of the visual arts and an invitation to look beyond what is visible. What seems like a gesture of surrender or fear in the face of difficult current events is actually a push to look beyond, to understand more deeply the not-always-immediate essence of what our senses perceive.”

For all information you can keep up to date by logging on to the Pecci Center website.

Museum life doesn't end when it closes its doors: here's the schedule for Prato's Pecci

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