MusLi (Museums Literacy) - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

26 MusLi - No qualifications needed: museums and new audiences
In addition, the invitation to create connections between the museum experience and the personal perspectives
of the individuals involved was shown to be important, and can be articulated as follows:
• Open listening to the interpretations and reactions that emerge from personal contact with museum
objects and spaces. Apart from the Collective Conversations example, hints of this also arise
from the dialogic interactive impact both of the visits to elderly people in the project Incontro al
museo (Town of Torino), and of the In Touch training programme (Manchester Museum).
• The choice of the best modalities for enjoying and using the collections being linked to meanings
and values that the people involved recognise. For instance, in the project illustrated by the Louvre,
the success of the workshops, as well as the conferences, was based on the personal meanings
that the prisoners assigned, respectively, to the activity, in this case to drawing, or to the listening
and to discussion in a reassuring space for the lesson.
• An approach to the collections that is not strictly disciplinary or academic. The lateral combinations
and references (to “minor” and private history, as the project Incontro al museo suggests
doing in the case of older audiences; to other “popular” and more famous cultural productions
– cinema, comics, music – as suggested by the Louvre case study) help people to understand
“cultivated” objects better and to bring them to life thanks to the connections with the visitors’
experiences, even though they are really distant from academic disciplines.
This attention to the participants’ lives and to the kinds of experiences and knowledge with which they
are familiar helps to avoid the need for the academic keys that decode the “authentic” meanings
of museum objects and that may make people feel “excluded” from the very beginning.
Open a listening space. Build trust
Considering what has been stated above, the capacity for listening to the audiences’ points of view,
experiences and requests makes all the difference.
This also appears to correspond to a psychological need, especially of audiences that do not recognise
themselves as “standard museum visitors” and perceive the museum as a stranger that overawes
them.
In general, the fact that the museum is taking into consideration people without the cultural skills that
usually or probably are required to have access to exhibitions or to museum projects is perceived by this
kind of audience as very satisfactory and reassuring.
In the case of the communication project of the exhibition Touch of Baroque carried out by the Province
of Bolzano, the simple consultation of the exhibition non-visitors (by means of a collective interview) produces
the first direct result of involving and reassuring the non-visitors, who stated to be more motivated
to participate in the future initiatives just for the fact of having been listened and considered.
Also in the case of the Torinese project Incontro al museo the capacity of creating an organisational context
for the museum visits that was “reassuring” for the participants is judged decisive by the project’s
managers.