The Peggy Guggenheim Collection launches Once Upon a Time, podcast inspired by four iconic works of the Avant-Garde

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is launching Once Upon a Time, a podcast conceived by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in collaboration with MILE, Museums and Innovation in Language Education of the CRDL of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and created by male and female students with migrant backgrounds from the C.P.I.A., Centro Provinciale Istruzione Adulti, of Venice. The podcast contains four multilingual stories inspired by four artists and thus four works belonging to the Venetian collection, symbols of the 20th century avant-garde: Umberto Boccioni, Vasilij Kandinsky, René Magritte, and Joan Miró.

The project grew out of a visit to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection as part of Io vado al museo, the program aimed at people with migrant backgrounds, created in 2020 and designed to promotesocial inclusion through educational paths based on the translanguaging approach.

During the visit, each class observed and analyzed Dynamism of a Running Horse + Houses by Umberto Boccioni, Landscape with Red Spots No. 2 by Vasily Kandinsky, The Empire of Light by René Magritte and Dutch Interior II by Joan Miró. The four works, representing the avant-garde movements of Futurism, Surrealism and abstraction, inspired as many stories, conceived by male and female students under the guidance of their teachers. Subsequently, the stories were recorded in the studios of Radio Ca’ Foscari, web radio of the Venetian university of the same name, and are now available on the museum’s website at the following link.

The stories were written and told in Italian with forays into the native languages of the narrators. Listening to them, one can appreciate the sounds and meanings of the many languages used: Albanian, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Flemish, French, English, Italian, Pashto, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Urdu, as well as Neapolitan and Venetian. Multilingualism is the podcast’s signature approach, as well as a method used by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in various social inclusion projects, as it is useful in promoting a vision that all languages and cultures are of equal value in building a plural society.

Pictured: Vasily Kandinsky, Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2 (1913; oil on canvas, 117.5 x 140 cm; Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection launches Once Upon a Time, podcast inspired by four iconic works of the Avant-Garde

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