Museums, where to start from: territory, school and university, alliance with the productive world

Like so many other vital centers of city life during the months of the pandemic, the museums were closed: by far the longest closure in memory since the end of the war. During those days, I often came to think of the immense monumental spaces inaccessible and ensconced in unreal silence as the most faithful custodians of the treasure trove of works they housed, precious allies of the city capable of preserving beauty to offer it again intact to the community wounded by the spread of the virus.

In fact, the first function of museums, namely that of the custody and preservation of works of art, has not been affected at all by the calamitous events that have struck the city, and even this trivial observation is worth marking a radical difference with the type of event with which completely improperly, in my opinion, the pandemic has in these difficult months often been associated, namely war: history teaches that the walls however mighty of museums could not prevent destruction, bombing and looting.

Museums have not been able to fulfill the function that is increasingly recognized as theirs, namely that of being places of “fruition” of culture, of dissemination of knowledge and beauty through the increasingly direct and accessible, simple and engaging knowledge of the works and history they narrate, designed and organized for a wide public and not only for scholars and insiders. This lack has been particularly serious at a time such as the one we have been experiencing, when the vacuum and silence that have been created in people’s lives would have required adequate stimuli. And indeed we have witnessed an enormous effort by all the major museum institutions to succeed in making permanent collections and temporary exhibitions virtually accessible through digital technology.

From this point of view, it must be acknowledged that the forced closure and the related need to invent new forms of communication with the public have been a formidable opportunity to enrich digital skills for all those involved in museum management and to accelerate on the road to integration between physical and web-based enjoyment, which is certainly one of the most advanced frontiers of museology. In particular, with reference to the experience of Brescia Musei, the closure provided an opportunity to accelerate and complete the in-depth study, already underway, on both the most innovative teaching methodologies for childhood and preadolescence and on the hands-on, digital, multimedia and interactive tools that guarantee the best engagement by children in the workshop activities of artistic contact and dissemination. Just as many formats devised and broadcast during the closing months constitute a wealth of assets that will not remain limited to the emergency period and the social world. In fact, work is underway for a transfer of the material to the Youtube channel and the Fondazione Brescia Musei website so that it can constitute a first nucleus of a “digital museum of Brescia.”

On the other hand, the great experiment on the potential of digital conducted during the period of enforced segregation gave clear evidence of the limitations that the use of technology inevitably encounters in artistic communication: where it acts as a substitute for, rather than an instrumental/integrative function of, direct experience, it proves ineffective and tedious. As in human relationships, so too in the relationship with the work of art, physical presence is not replaceable, founded as it is on five senses instead of only one or two.

Brescia, the Santa Giulia Museum

Precisely for this reason the Foundation felt it was its duty, among the very first museum institutions in Italy, to physically return its heritage of art and history to the community as soon as the reopening was authorized, obviously in strict compliance with the regulations and suggestions drawn up by the authorities and the scientific community in order to make visits safe.

Therefore, the very strong discontinuity with established habits imposed by the pandemic immediately gave impetus to the experimentation of new forms of attendance and enjoyment of the artistic heritage. Not only that: it adds, in my opinion, a great stimulus to the reflection that was already underway on what models of activity and what kind of programming cultural institutions should pursue, especially in a place like our city.

What now appears in fact quite clear is the limit of a model necessarily based on very large numbers of visitors, on massive transfers of works and people, on huge investments of money: it seems all too clear, indeed, that the segregation of people imposed by the pandemic has turned a huge spotlight on the problems of sustainability, both economic and social and environmental, that had already loomed up with reference to a necessarily global and mass model of cultural tourism.

Conversely, the experience of these months, to be understood almost as a stress test on the resilience of cultural institutions, also seems to me to consolidate the idea of a vocation for the “proximity” of the institution with respect to its territory, both from the point of view of function and content.

From the functional point of view, proximity to the territory must be understood as an increasingly strong and structured engagement of the museum institution in the service of the community to which it belongs and, at the same time, as the appropriation by the community in all its different components of the museum spaces.

The elective sphere for this mutual exchange arises first of all in the field of education and, therefore, with schools: in fact, it is possible to imagine that the already numerous and qualified ludo/didactic/educational services that the more structured museums carry out in favor of educational institutions and, more generally, of school-age children (Santa Giulia is a virtuous example, in terms of organizing specific visits, summer campetcetera) can be integrated by making available the same museum spaces and the skills of highly qualified personnel for the carrying out of curricular school activities. And so, in addition to resolving in the contingency of the present moment the paradox represented by schools that are too full in the face of museums that are too empty, the strength of a virtuous bond between the city and its inhabitants in training, of whatever origin they may be, a bond founded on the awareness of the high value of citizenship that artistic heritage adequately told and experienced can bestow on the younger generations and on the culture of beauty as a founding value of harmonious growth, would be reinforced.

Similarly, it is possible to imagine a strengthening of the link between museum and university institutions under the sign of mutual permeability, to be realized both at the level of scientific or educational collaborations and, again, in the use of museum spaces or in forms of privileged accessibility to collections and archives for the benefit of students.

Another terrain on which it is possible to decline other forms of proximity between the museum institution and the territory is that of alliance with public and private institutions as well as with the vast world of volunteering to deal with various forms of social and material hardship, whether this concerns young people, the elderly or the sick. From this point of view, the experiments already underway seem particularly promising and wide possible developments.

Entirely necessary and strategic then is the strengthening of the link with the productive world, through the creation of a “community” of private and institutional actors, which transcends the traditional dimension of the typical synallagmatic pact intrinsic to cultural sponsorships, renewing it in a logic of openness, sharing of planning and also of physical spaces, communication and creation of widespread experiences for the awareness of the key role of each actor in achieving the high social objectives linked to cultural support and promotion. That is, there is a need to establish a lasting, participatory and mutually beneficial relationship between museum institutions and companies under the banner of promoting the fundamental social and economic development asset of the city that is its cultural heritage. Emphasizing at the local level this natural link between private actors and public management bodies in the enhancement of heritage allows, in other words, to “reawaken the roots” by confronting the contemporaneity of one’s territory as an essential driver for the development of the community.

I close these brief notes with a question, starting with the theme of the first temporary exhibition organized at the Santa Giulia Museum since the reopening of the Museums, after the more than seventy days of segregation and the little more than two months of restarting museum activities to the public. The project “GestoZero. Snapshots 2020” speaks to us, with the language of contemporary art, of the emergency and the drama we have experienced in a perspective of rebirth, in the sign of the reaffirmation of man’s creative capacity. It directly addresses the theme of the emptiness from which the gesture of artistic creation draws the work into life and of the fatigue, of the silence on which that gesture necessarily feeds and of which, in a way, the deadly isolation to which the pandemic has forced is a metaphor, pointing to the necessity and fatigue of its overcoming. The origin of creativity thus takes us into a context that seems infinitely distant from the outcomes of a certain art world, particularly contemporary art, which seems to be dominated by actors (I am referring in particular to some international galleries with billion-dollar revenues) moved by interests that evidently transcend the values related to the pure authenticity and creativity of the artistic gesture. I wonder, therefore, if the experience we have lived through can also in this field challenge “capitalist globalization” models in order to mark the way for a necessary return to a closer and more attentive consideration of the authenticity and effort of artistic creation.

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