MusLi (Museums Literacy) - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Final recommendations
MusLi - No qualifications needed: museums and new audiences
Perhaps because they are very heterogeneous, the case studies illustrated and compared here have
led to a large number of reflections that need to be taken into account when addressing a museum’s
offer to audiences with low cultural capital.
In some cases – only a few – the partners’ evaluations did not concur and results emerging from apparently
identical operational solutions differed, suggesting that more precise conclusions need to be
tested by further in-depth examination based on specific research (which is outside the parameters
of this project). In this regard, see the titles “Communication/Contact” and “Quality of the proposed
experiences/Times and spaces” at the end of this section.
Basing on a general analysis and comparison of the case studies illustrated hereafter, these can be
underpinned as final remarks:
Develop global and structured approaches. Rethink all phases of the museum’s offer,
from conception to realization to evaluation and amendment
If the museum wants to reach and involve audiences which are less culturally endowed, it needs to
abandon a logic of “reproduction”, or even of “adaptation” of a “standard” cultural offer to the specific
sets of barriers and needs of these audiences.
The efficacy of a project that addresses particularly demotivated groups or individuals whose system of
values is far removed from that with which the museum is associated, requires consistently reinventing
and modifying all phases of the activities – conception, planning, realization - that a museum
“usually” manages.
It is quite evident, for instance, that it is not sufficient for a museum to “lift barriers to access”, such as
economic, linguistic or physical ones, in order to lay the foundation for a positive investment by or active
involvement of this kind of audience in the museum activities. A general attitude of indifference
of many non-users, originating either from a lack of self-esteem or from previous disappointing
experiences, makes them unresponsive to conventional proposals coming from museums, focused
as they are on the values of “cultured” people and experts, as well as to promotional messages
referring to the same values. Moreover, that attitude of indifference risks being confirmed and
reinforced by every aspect of the museum experience that creates a sense of distance – in the style
of communication, the set of contents, the framework of values and cultural references, and also ways
of inhabiting and making use of the museum – and bringing about the failure of the experience itself as
a final result. That is to say, this feeling of distance risks leading a museum to “lose” once again, maybe
more consciously, a group of potential users, rather than engendering in them a positive and interested
attitude towards what museums have to offer.
In terms of the efficacy of a project other factors are equally active: the set of motivations it refers
to, the capacity for removing and tackling every kind of obstacle arising from the experience and the
nature of the target audiences (economic, physical, sensory, psychological/affective and linguistic con-
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