A Museum for the Museum-goerInternational Conference

Museums and visitors: a question of identity

Strategies in educating and communicating culture in response to a growing and multifarious demand

Florence (Italy), Palazzo Vecchio-Museo Stibbert, October 26-27-28, 2001

 

Friday, October 26, 2001  

 Introductory speech by 

Daniela Lastri, Chairman, Department of Public Education, Commune of Florence

Bernard Légé, Deputy for Museums and Science Sites, CNRS Image/Média

 

 

Session 1:

The Museum of the Third Millennium and Reconstructing Knowledge: dialogue between art and science

Chairman: Mariella Zoppi, Chairman, Department  of Culture, Region of Tuscany

Papers:

Carlo Sisi, Artistic and Historical Heritage Supervisory Services, Florence

Paolo Galluzzi, Director, Institute and Museum of Science History, Florence

Session 2:

The Museum of the Third Millennium and Reconstructing Knowledge: education and museum systems

Chairman: Stefano Bruzzesi, Chairman, Department of Tourism and Civic Museums, Commune of Florence, 

Papers:

Chiara Silla, Director, Civic Museums of Florence

Daniele Jallà, Civic Museums of Turin

Anne Konitz, Conservatoire du Littoral, Paris

Gian Bruno Ravenni, Servizio Biblioteche, Musei e Attività Culturali, Region of Tuscany



Session 3:

The Museum of the Third Millennium and Reconstructing Knowledge: on-line education

Chairman: Andrea Ceccarelli, Chairman, Department of Civic Websites and Informatics, Commune of Florence

Papers:

Frédérique Leseur, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Massimo Marcolin, Museo dei Ragazzi di Firenze

Celia Moore, IBM Corporate Community Relations EMEA

Chris MacLure, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow



Saturday, October 27, 2001

 

Session 4:

Education in the Museum of the Third Millennium: children's museums or family programmes?

Chairman: Simone Siliani, Chairman, Department of Culture, Commune of Florence

Papers:

Francine Labrosse, Musée d'Archéologie et d'Histoire de Montréal

John Reeve, The British Museum, London

Daniel Soulier, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Beata Maria Schneider, Museumsdienst, Köln

  

Session 5 :

Education in the Museum of the Third Millennium: communication tools to make past and present dialogue

Chairman: Jean-Michel Arnold, Chairman, International Council for Film Television and Audiovisual Communication (CICT-IFTC) care of UNESCO, Paris

Papers:

Paola Pacetti, Museo dei Ragazzi di Firenze

Anne-Michèle Ulrich-Peressetchensky, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Lucie Amos, Museum of London, London

Bernard Gérard, Palais de la Découverte, Paris 

Jorge Wagensberg, Director, Museo de la Ciencia, Barcelona



Sunday, October 28, 2001

 

Workshop: Aiming to a Family Museum Network

Chairman: Paola Pacetti, Museo dei Ragazzi di Firenze

Discussion:Participating museums draft a preliminary agreement to publish educational and communication proposals on line for a family public:  family museums on line.

 

Conference Premises

1    During the course of its long history, the museum as an organism has several times modified (and often radically so) the intellectual premises and finalities that determined the reason for its existence.  At the end of the 1700s and in the course of the XIX century, the museum became specialised, collections were separated, science and art made their final break:  the great shrine-museums dedicated to various disciplines were born.  The shrine-museum had a very precise mission: a public structure dedicated to culturally elevating the country and educating its citizens, also to the idea of nation.

2        To get a picture of the public of this specialised shrine-museum, let us recall that education and culture were the exclusive prerogative of an elite and it was this small group of visitors that the museum addressed.  In Writings on Art, seventy years ago Paul Valéry described his impressions during a visit to a museum in these terms ."I soon forgot why I had come to this waxen solitude that smelled like a temple or drawing room."  As late as the 1930s, a visit to a museum was not an experience shared by many, nor was cultural consumption (though not yet known with this term):  A concert, a visit to an art city or archaeological site, a theatre performance or enjoying a book were all occasions reserved to few.

3        Since the end of World War II and, in particular, since the 1970s, this situation has changed profoundly in all industrialised countries.  Generalised literacy campaigns, along with an economic development extended to every social level, has favoured the diffusion of cultural consumption among increasingly wider segments of population, a process that is today commonly defined with the term "mass culture."  Evident symptoms of what is among the greatest novelties of this century include phenomena such as the diffusion of so-called cultural tourism, the increase of opportunities for cultural diffusion favoured by increasingly more sophisticated communication technologies, the attention of producers of culture for the tastes and interests of an increasingly more undifferentiated public.  These factors today, among other things, make it possible to move a consistent part of cultural consumption within domestic walls.

4   Museums were also subjected to this quickly paced dynamics that led to a general increase in the number of visitors worldwide (Italy has recorded a 60% increase since the seventies).  On the threshold of the third millennium, the museum is one medium of a vaster and more aggressive cultural consumption circuit on which it has to come to terms with brand-new concepts.  Productivity, capacity to attract new visitors, increased autofinancing in its budget and the adoption of the latest technologies in its exhibiting corpus, all come to bear on the museum in performing its role in conservation and cultural distribution.  A role that is also highlighted in the ICOM definition of Museum that reads:  a museum is a permanent, non-profit-making institution, serving society and for its development and open to the public that purchases, conserves, studies, communicates and exhibits in view of studying, educating, entertaining and providing material testimony of man and his environment.

5    No longer a shrine but still heavily characterised by its specialised structure inherited from the XIX century, today the museum of the Third Millennium must redefine its mission and, consequently, its communication and education strategies, which is to say, the means and forms of cultural production and distribution to a very wide, supernational and extremely diversified public. This museum system, that for brevity we have termed specialised, has been joined by new institutions especially as of the sixties (without forgetting the Palais de la Découverte in the thirties that was an anticipation).  Emblematically, some of these have abandoned the definition of museum to take on that of Science Centre; while still termed museums, others exclusively address one segment of the public, like the children's museums or, more recently, institutions with universal vocations have preferred the term of Cité, like the Cité des Sciences et des Techniques and the Cité de la Musique.  These new institutions are almost all dedicated to science and technology that, even inside Children's Museums, occupy a particularly important role, but their peculiar feature is in the communication modalities based on a hands-on interactive approach.

6        Though schematically, today's museum panorama can be termed extremely variegated and many are the contaminations in communication modalities between even very dissimilar museums, as well as between museums and forms of entertainment, especially theatre.  At the same time, the proposals that individual museums make to the public have become more articulated and differentiated by target.  Rarely, however, does international debate and communication tools production confront the theme of reconstructing knowledge and its fields, the only act that could enable moving beyond the specialised museum, whether interactive or not.  Yet the damage of a compartmentalised fruition of knowledge by the public is frequent and often macroscopic:  one need only recall the predominantly emotional perception of individual works of art, the so-called masterpieces, that are totally decontextualised and separated from the culture that produced them.  This results in the public's continued unawareness of the blend of technical, theoretical, philosophical, political and religious knowledge that lies behind every work of art.  On the other hand, scientific culture continues to be segregated and is often not even recognised as an essential component of knowledge.  These distortions prove even more serious when referred to one of the museum's essential functions, that of educating, in which the museum directly addresses schools of every kind and level.

Convention target issues

a)      In view of what we have schematically recalled, is it possible and feasible to invite reflection on moving past specialisation in disciplinary fields of knowledge, reclaiming for the museum - and this might seem a paradox - a more thoroughly historic dimensionI, moving from its commonly accepted view of a place that communicates vestiges of the past to a place where knowledge and its branches are reconstructed? Is it possible to attractively reintroduce scientific culture, with its historic dimension, as an essential component of knowledge in art museum and, at the same time, bring back historic and artistic culture to scientific museum, thus re-establishing a connection between the different spheres of knowledge? 

b)     In the course of the 1900s, large museums have witnessed a development of their services aimed at young people and, in particular, at the school world; ad hoc museum structures to address the young and very young have been created.  Does this important educational function make the museum an extension of school activity and does it require the same disciplinary articulation?  In other words, is the museum a place where one is stimulated to gain knowledge by means of a different emotional and rational involvement and by the reconstruction of knowledge, in the "social" dimension of the visit, undertaken in most cases in groups, almost always accompanied by family member or friends?  

Convention objectives

a)      Is it possible to create an Internet portal of different museum experiences on an international level and aimed at a public of families - of both tourist and citizen - in view of creating with the museum a valid alternative to amusement parks?

b)      Comparing the viewpoints and experiences of large international museums on these issues, the conference intends to be the first of a series of meetings aimed at developing reflection on the museum and stimulating European co-operation in the production of multilingual modules (multimedia, workshops, ateliers, dramatization, etc.), that can itinerate among the different partner institution. The round table discussion that will close the conference will indeed seek to lay the basis for a project of a European network of "family museums

 

General informations

 Colloquium languages are Italian, French and English, with a simultaneous interpreting service.  The up-to-date programme will be published on line at the Museo dei Ragazzi site (www.museoragazzi.it) Conference minutes will be published on line in the reserved area.

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