MusLi (Museums Literacy) - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

MusLi - No qualifications needed: museums and new audiences
• questionnaires (Manchester Museum - UK, Foundation for Museums and visitors - HU, Fitzcarraldo
Foundation + A come Ambiente Museum - I, Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano Alto
Adige – Südtirol - I)
• collective interviews (Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano Alto Adige – Südtirol - I)
• in-depth qualitative analysis (analysis of the context, comparative analysis of similar projects,
expert interviews, in-depth interviews and group meetings with participants and inmates who
did not participate, ethnographic observation of the activities – Louvre Museum - F)
Each partner will illustrate the chosen methods and tools in the description of the respective case
studies.
4. Focus points
In order to compare some best practice in targeting audiences with a low schooling level, four
areas of action by museums have been taken into special account which correspond to four
phases during which these kinds of audiences could express their needs, difficulties or particular
barriers and through which a museum proposal can be judged as effective or can fail according
its original objectives towards these audiences:
1. motivation
2. communication/contact (channels, spaces, strategies)
3. museum language/interpretation
4. kind of experience proposed by the museum
A first assumption (supported by some positive museum experiences) is that, in all four phases,
the museum can have a proactive and active role, working on the elements that can discourage
or prevent the target audiences from visiting the museums.
In other words, the key points underlined concern the contextual factors that may help with
building a “literacy” for decoding and satisfactorily making use of museum collections: the museum
itself, as a medium and as a context 1 for the transmission of the meaning of its collections,
can be a core element in preventing or encouraging learning and the visit experiences as such.
The museum as an institution, an idea and a set of practices and models is in fact in constant
evolution; it is therefore correct to think that the kind of project and methodologies that contemporary
museums can put into practice to address successfully different kinds of publics become
on its turn one of the stakes in the measurement of the appeal and the impact of the museum
offer on audiences traditionally “disadvantaged” by a low schooling level.
1 Beginning with the historic analysis by D. Cameron of the museum as a communicative system (D. Cameron, A Viewpoint: The Museum as a Communications System
and Implications for Museum Education, Curator, 11, 1, 1968) the reflection on this issue has hugely developed, thanks to theoretical contributions deriving from modern
learning theories and from communication sociology, to such a degree that it is only possible to touch on it here.
It is possible to state that this debate led to two main visions about the weight of the different factors in museum communication: Cameron’s vision of the museum as a
“medium” of transmission, on the one hand, and the idea of the museum as an “environment” or a scenario where communication takes place, on the other. Cameron’s idea
has been basically accepted especially by science or technology museums, where the “communicativeness” of the objects displayed is often minimal and the possibility of
drawing meanings from them is, simply entrusted to the museum narratives. The idea of museums as an environment or scenario refers to arts museums, storing objects
conceived as communicative in themselves: in this case the medium is the object, and the museum acts as a “catalyst” for the communicative effect of the object (for a
particularly detailed explanation of this vision, see F. Antinucci, Comunicare nel museo, 2004).
17