In 1979 Italian museums were defined as "ill", stagnant repositories of lifeless artifacts. Once revered as sacred sanctuaries dedicated to the muses, Italian museums entered a prolonged period of crisis that continues.
While post-Covid-19 visitors eagerly returned to museums, significant portions of the population have never set foot in one, while the population is also ageing.
Are there any ways to revamp Italian museums? Maybe through innovative strategies that could ensure museum collections were more accessible to broader audiences, as those described in the talk "Deriva: Enabling Culture to Drift to Avoid a Cultural Loss" (Download Deriva_byAnnaBattista_Irenebrination), that will be presented today by Anna Battista (founder or Irenebrination.com) at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) auditorium as part of the TFAM 40 Conference (from today till 6th October) celebrating the 40th anniversary of the museum.
The talk moves from a case study about Palazzo Mocenigo, the Museum and Study Centre of the History of Fabrics, Costumes, and Perfume, in Venice, Italy. The presentation then introduces a groundbreaking and imaginative concept - the potential development of mobile or floating sustainable museum structures that may be used to display selected pieces from collections.
These structures could travel to diverse locations, breathing new life into harbor areas and extending public access to invaluable museum collections. People could go and visit the itinerant exhibition as it arrives in their own city, and they may then travel to the main museum to see the rest of the collection. The itinerant museum would therefore promote local development and improve the visibility of the museum in other places.
In this way museums would reach out to people of all ages, besides, the institutions would be able to take out of their archives pieces that aren't usually exhibited and display them also in other places without having to loan them to other museums (the talk attempts to tackle the three main topics of the conference - "Art Museums and the Public: Navigating Low Birth Rates and Aging Populations", "Art Museums and Local Area Renewal" and "Art Museums and City Images").
The talk looks at examples of other floating structures, from Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)'s Urban Rigger to the eight dynamic, box-like galleries inspired by the islands of the Seto Inland Sea, designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban for the Simose Art Museum, that opened its doors in March 2023.
The title of the talk - "deriva" - means "drifting" in Italian and it is a pun on the fact that these structures would allow the contents of a museum to drift away from its main location and land in other places to promote knowledge, culture and history. The term also indicates the possibility of drifting away from the concept of sacredness of the art space that has fossilized museums in a static rut, to promote the museum as a social space for socialization, interaction and cultural cross-pollination.
While maybe this at the moment is a dream suspended between design and invention, there's nothing wrong in imagining the future as - to paraphrase Jules Verne's insightful maxim - whatever one can imagine, others will be able to achieve.
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