Local Museums: New Spaces for a Contemporary Heritage Epic?

Local museums: new spaces for a contemporary heritage epic?

ABSTRACT: The theme of the lecture is to present a new approach in museography, the in terdisciplinary group Spazi Consonanti has developed and tested throughout the years working on several local ecomuseums in Italy, through the example of latest of them: a community museum in Tuscany, on its way to be completed, the "Museum of the Olive Tree and Land of Seg giano". The core idea of this approach is to design a museum where the scientific languages of museology are joined with the language of contemporary arts and architecture together, in the narration of a community heritage. Telling a story through the means of a poetic language is what has been done for centuries in every fresco cycle, in every relief, in every church and public building throughout Europe: art can tell a very particular story through a universal language, making the narration accessible to everybody, no matter where the visitor comes from, or what his age, ability or background is.

The museographic method, that is going to be presented in this paper, is the result of a 20year-old on the field research, carried out by architects and artists together in several ecomu seums in Italy. The experience of this work became the backbone for the interdisciplinary group Spazi Consonanti, founded in 2007, of which I'm part since its inception together with three architects - Mao Benedetti, Sveva Di Martino, Vania Gianese - and with the artists Gianandrea Gazzola and Stefano Scialotti.

The research having been carried out over such a long span of time, this paper will not deal with the key aspects of our museographic method alone, but will list the actual results and visit or experiences gathered throughout the years. This is why, while the core section of the text will present the most recent project of our group, the Museum of the Olive Tree and Land of Seggiano in Tuscany - that began as early as 2005 and still is being worked on - the introduction will briefly present the design and actual results of the first of the group's projects, the Museo dell'Olio della Sabina, in Castelnuovo di Farfa.

The history of European art and culture provides the most vivid example of how the same story can be told in as many different ways, as the territories, cultures and languages involved are: this is why every church and every fresco cycle, while housing the very same function, or depicting the very same episode as many others, is as unique as the place it stems from (Borges,

2004). The two museums I'm going to talk about, share the same theme - the history and tradition of olive oil production - and are both thought and designed for small rural centres of nearly the same size and period of foundation - Castelnuovo di Farfa, not far from Rome, and Seggia no, in Tuscany - but happen to provide the visitor with two contextual experiences, very different from one another.

What is common to both the projects, is the need to address the deeply significant issue of the survival of the identity and culture of a small community. Each museum had to present its own specific local culture through contemporary means and languages, so to show its continuity, liveliness and competitiveness in our times.

But how to reach that goal? How to make the experience of a local museum both unique and suited for each and every visitor, no matter what his or her age, culture, abilities or language are? And, at the same time, how to reach the local community so that the young and the old together can take pride in their very own culture through the museum?

The core idea for our method is to experiment with the narrative languages of contemporary art and architecture, as a means to deepen the experience of the visit and to support the scientific languages of museology (Heidegger, 1997). Art reaches for every visitor, being able to draw out of a specific tradition its underlying universal themes. As Nico Stringa - professor of Contemporary Art at the Ca' Foscari University in Venice - eloquently explained in the catalogue for the Museo dell'Olio della Sabina "For the very first time a museum dedicated to material culture, and in the specific case to the production of olive oil, was planned employing a revolutionary concept that abandons the archaeological tradition of a classical museum by reversing the orientation of the museum itself. This museum begins in the present with contemporary art in order to understand the past better. Art today explains the handicrafts of yesteryear." (Stringa, 2001).

Fig.1 - the restored church of San Donato; the artwork Oleophona, Museo dell'Olio della Sabina

Already while planning the Museo dell'Olio della Sabina - a project that began in the early 90's and was unveiled in 2001, although some parts of it are still under construction - the local authorities expressed the desire to include in the visit all the most significant sites and buildings of Castelnuovo di Farfa. This strategy had for us the clear goal of finding a way to safeguard every testimony of the local heritage from abandonment and destruction, by turning them into cornerstones of the new museum program.

The first step in realizing the project was to restore the buildings that were to house the new exhibition; every architectural intervention differed from the others so to value and exploit the potential of each site, rather than using a fixed formal approach. The visit was structured an ascent from the outskirts of the town up to its historical centre, ending in a restored mediaeval church right in the middle of an olive grove (Figure 1, the restored church of San Donato, one of the stations of the visit to the Museo dell’Olio della Sabina; the artwork Oleophona by Gianandrea Gazzola in one of the rooms of the museum).

Six world-renowned contemporary artists - Alik Cavaliere, Gianandrea Gazzola, Emanuele Luzzati, Maria Lai, Hidetoshi Nagasawa and Ille Strazza - were asked to take part to the design, each one of them having to deal with a very specific place, either a room of one of the buildings, or a whole site. Every artist worked autonomously on site, but bearing in mind the general theme and structure of the museum, as well as the ultimate social goal of the intervention, and the wider hope to bring art back to grounds that could be shared by all the visitors.

Great interest on the project was shown by the national and international press (Kaplan, 2000; Herbst, 2000; Palmegiani, 2003), for at last a small Italian town provided a lively strategy to keep the younger generations from leaving its territory, in the hope of building their future in the near cities.

After the 2001 unveiling, our group was asked to get directly involved in the scientific direc tion of the museum, a task that lasted nearly ten years, giving us the chance not only to verify the effects of the proposed museographic approach, but to really understand all the everyday challenges and problems that a local museum has, that can be nonetheless prevented or at least mitigated already while developing the project.

The greater of all these challenges is without any doubt the economic survival of the museum; it is a challenge that can be truly faced only if every interested party, such as the local politics or the community, is involved, but that can be addressed by the designer by providing the museum with the spaces it needs to start a series of side activities, ranging from didactics to cultural encounters, even before the core exhibition opens. This problem is not to be underestimated, for the very local identity that needs to be preserved, relies on cultural as well as on economic means.

Within the first four years since the opening, the guides – none of whom had at the time graduated – started working both with the students of the schools of central Italy, and got paid for preparing and forming the teachers that wanted to get involved with the didactic programs offered by the Museo dell’Olio. This was probably one of the greatest successes on the road to the economic autonomy of the museum itself.

Sadly the fruitful pooling of efforts that surrounded the Museo dell’Olio della Sabina, was not destined to last long. The local politicians did not support its activities and failed to com plete the other renewal projects in the historical centre, that were meant to boost the economic growth propagating from the new museum. Nonetheless, visitors from all over the world never ceased to come and to speak up their enthusiasm for the project, two real estate agencies and several commercial activities opened in Castelnuovo di Farfa, the didactic program offered by the guides continued to be of the utmost interest not only for the schools in the surrounding area, but for the universities in Rome as well, which became directly involved in the museum through internships, graduation theses, workshops and competitions.

Several books and articles have been written on this small local museum and on its innovat ive conception, stimulating an international debate that led to a nomination for the European Museum Award in Copenhagen (2003), a presentation in the international symposium “Szenographie” organized in DASA’s State Museum in Dortmund (2005), a call to the Koeln Heritage Fair (2007) - where the “Museo dell’Olio” was chosen as one of the three most compelling museographic researches in Europe, alongside with the New Bauhaus Archives and the Kolumba museum in Koeln - and lastly to being selected for the Italian Pavilion of the 13th In ternational Architecture Biennale in Venice (August-November 2012).

The academic debate, the direct experience both with the visitors and with the local communities as well as the involvement in the scientific direction of the museum in Castelnuovo, deepened throughout the years our understanding of the relations between local community and local museum, and helped us to further develop and structure our design approach. It is with the project for the Museo dell’Olivastra e della Terra di Seggiano (Museum of the Olive Tree and of the Land of Seggiano), also known as Museo dell’Olio di Seggiano (Olive Oil Museum of Seggiano), that this decennial research came to a more informed result in the narration of the heritage and culture of the town of Seggiano in Tuscany. Before going into detail on the project, a step back is needed to sum up the key aspects of the museographic approach of Spazi Consonanti and thereby address the issue raised in the very title of this paper: can local museums be come new spaces for a contemporary heritage epic? And if so, how?

Museums and cultural sites, hold tangible or intangibile testimonies that speak of the symbolic transmission between generations: heritage is what we have received from our fathers and we think is worth passing along to our children. In our times, museums are among the very few places where this transmission is not only ensured but shown and narrated. Therefore museums are by vocation the spaces where each man can feel part of the age-old tradition and history of a specific culture.

We believe that probably the real reason why cultural tourism has become so popular, is the search of an answer to the deep, lasting human need of feeling part of something bigger than one is, a need that is often left unheard in the visit of cultural sites (Di Martino, 2011). It is therefore with great hope that, while attending the international conference Il Museo verso una Nuova Identità (Museums towards a new identity – Rome, 2007-2008), we discovered in several new local museums all over the world, a sort of answer to this very compelling general need. On the other hand, it came as no great surprise to us, that the major museums which were de bated upon in the same conference, which were born to collect the most diverse testimonies of the most different cultures, experimented on a play and learn approach rather than on the use of art and narrative experience, for they lacked the main and irreplaceable actors of the transmission between generations we spoke of before, the local community and its native context (Cirese, 1967).

In local museums, instead, the scientific languages of museology, and the narrative ones of museography, can fruitfully work together, the one caring for the preservation, safeguarding and study of the heritage, the other unveiling and telling its underlying universal themes. “Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu” (Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses) is what Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas said, and what has been done throughout the centuries in western civilization: using art as universal means of spreading knowledge.

Each heritage calls for a different approach in the museographic project, and every time different architectonic and artistic languages must be employed; nonetheless the general design method is the same, and can be summed up in the following steps:

1.

Acknowledgement of the museological project and of the desires of the local community regarding the cultural, social and economic aspects of their contemporary identity;

2.

Acknowledgement of the spaces that are going to be enclosed in the museum program, and of the ones that might in the future; analysis of their own particular physical character, so to exploit their potential through the preliminary architectural interventions; acknowledgement of the local heritage that will become the core of the new museum;

3.

Outlining of the key narrative of the new museum, starting from the acknowledged spaces, museological project and heritage and community life. The key narrative will become the underlying structure of the whole visit, the theme and name of the local museum, providing a bond between the autonomous stations of the visit. These stations will house both the historical heritage and the specifically designed contemporary artworks;

4.

First drafting of the structure of the museum, imagined this time as a sequence of spaces, for the visit is essentially a spatial experience. This draft is a means of under standing where and how to show the historical testimonies and which artistic interventions are overall needed to tell the story properly, which the artistic languages should be, and who the most suited artist for the intervention is. The more valid and appropriate the interventions of art and architecture are, the clearer and more direct will be the experi ence of every visitor stepping into the museum;

5.

Drafting of the guided visit, in order to form the young locals on the main themes of their heritage and on the outline of the museum. The dialogue they open with the visitors, so important to make the museum an actual space of social exchange, should wander between scientific and artistic registers, for they must be able to intertwine the key aspects of the museological project with the metaphors provided by the artworks.

The active experience of the visit, becomes an actual meeting between local community and global world. Moreover, by having a common ground from which the dialogue can begin, and by sharing a common experience, people do come together: “It is not merely being together, but is the purpose that brings everybody together, and prevents them from talking by themselves, or to live autonomous experiences” (Gadamer, 1977).

It is, in fact, the shared experience alone that makes visitors want to come back to the mu seum, for the dialogue with the guides is each time different. This is why the tours last so long (the tour through the eleven spaces of the Museo dell'Olio della Sabina never lasted less than two hours), and why there can’t be no autonomous visit: the museums preserves the historical and contemporary testimonies of the local heritage, but it is the community that brings it to life.

Such museums could only exist in the dilated time of internal, rural territories, for “The es sence of art’s temporal experience is to learn to linger" (Gadamer, 1977). This renovated attention on the timing of the experience could never be applied to bigger cultural sites, and is one of the exclusive strengths of local museums; this is why the historical testimonies that have to be shown are carefully selected, and the stations of the visit are few.

The young locals that work as guides in these museums play a major role in the success and significance of the experience: they are trained as narrators, and their ability, somewhere between mere communication and acting, is to all intents and purposes one of the artistic languages of the museum.

Olive oil has always played a pivotal role for the culture and economy of Seggiano, a small town sitting on the slopes of Mount Amiata, in Tuscany (Alessandro da Seggiano, 1913). In its extensively cultivated territory grows a unique olive tree cultivar, the Olivastra seggianese ; the several historical olive oil mills, that can be found in the historical town centre, are a tangible proof of the long history of olive oil production in this area. This specific agricultural tradition is today as significant for the economy of Seggiano as it had been in the past: the recently acquired DOP certification constitutes one of the few concrete economic promises for countless small local farming businesses.

Iron mines and ironworks have always been part of the life and work of the local community members up until the recent past, and testimonies of this activity can be still seen throughout the territory. The atmospheres and materials of mining have doubtlessly influenced the character of the spaces of agricultural production: this particular trait d’union is one of the most distinctive features of the built agricultural heritage of Seggiano.

Saint Bernardino of Siena, one of the earliest Franciscan preachers and one of the brightest exponents of Italian literature in the XV century, received his formation and began his preaching in the Colombaio monastery (Niccolai, 2000), just a few kilometers away from the historical town centre. It was clear from early on that this site, now abandoned, needed to have a key role in the future museum.

In 2005 we, as Spazi Consonanti, were first asked to work on a project for Seggiano. At the time, the town and its territory became part of a European network of agricultural landscapes; the idea of making this virtual network tangible and understandable for the citizens, marked the beginning of the project of the museum, which was then to be developed and structured in the following years. Instead of focusing on the landscape alone, the European network project, which was then called Radici Intelligenti / Intelligent roots , investigated the hidden and unknown half of the plants, their roots, metaphor of the bonds between a local community and its

territory. In each node of the network the most typical plant of the area had to be chosen and the electric activity of its roots studied, to translate it then poetically in a musical score, different from plant to plant, from territory to territory. The key narrative of the buried half of the plants, that hinted also at the mining tradition of the area, became the strongest underlying theme for the Museo dell’Olivastra e della Terra di Seggiano.

Just a few months after beginning to work on the European project we discovered with great surprise, that one of the most important research centers worldwide on plant neurobiology was in Tuscany as well, the LINV (Laboratorio Internazionale di Neurobiologia Vegetale – International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology). The shared interests between the museum and the Laboratory directed by Prof. Mancuso, gave birth to the first significant alliance of the Museo dell’Olio with the best practices of the territory.

While reflecting on the more general themes of the new museum program, we were asked to acknowledge all the sites that could have become part of the visit. It was a series of very diverse spaces, for either typology or architecture: the most significant piece of built heritage was surely an old oil mill, spanning over four floors right next to the town’s main square; there was an old buried water cistern resting on the former town walls; a former bank right in the centre of the town; the abandoned and severely damaged building of the former town hall; the ruins of the Colombaio monastery; the three churches in the historical centre.

The experience of the hidden half, of the invisible, suited well not only the duplicity of the mining and agricultural traditions of the local community, but also the actual physical spaces that were going to house the museum. Starting from this key narrative, the stations of the visit to the Museo dell’Olivastra e della Terra di Seggiano were structured as follows (Figure 2, Seggiano and its territory; project for the suspension and monitoring of the roots, and its eventual poetical translation, by Gianandrea Gazzola).:

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Museum services: the services are laid at the entrance to the town. Parking lots, spaces for didactics and laboratories are organized in a building and in a urban park close by;

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First station of the visit to the Museum: the Church of San Rocco. The church is near to the museum services and marks both the entrance to Seggiano, and the introduction to the key narrative of the museum, that is to read what's invisible in the visible world. The religious theme is of great interest to the development of the narration: it is religion that gave shape to Italian towns as we know them and organized both their productive and religious life. The culture we want to preserve and transfer, is born of a unity of the spiritual and everyday life, a unity we’ve now lost and can hardly understand. The contemporary artistic languages that will work on the churches, will try to make the invisible rules of a sacred space visible, such as light, sound, rite etc. In the church of San Rocco, there is a fresco depicting Saint Bernardino of Siena, who was known for being able, in his preaching, to intertwine the visible and the invisible worlds. The main theme of the visit has been presented, and the visitors can move along to the second station after a short walk along an olive grove.

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Second station of the visit to the Museum: the XIX century buried water cistern. The cistern consists in a 12 meter high cylindrical hollow volume, that leads from the level of the entrance to the town, up to its actual centre. This station is the symbolic doorstep of the museum and houses what is probably the most evocative experience of the whole visit: inside of the perfectly preserved cistern, the roots of an Olivastra seggianese, sitting on top of the cistern itself, will be left hanging and visible to the naked eye. The tree will be the world’s largest plant to be fed hydroponically through the vapours of a water pool and nebulizers. All the electrical impulses of the roots will be registered, monitored, studied and then poetically translated into a written musical score. Trunk and foliage of the tree will be visible from the small square just above the buried cistern, where a new urban vertical connection will allow the visitors to reach the historical town centre. There, overlooking the vast agricultural territory of Seggiano, the theme of landscape not just as a visible aesthetic experience but as fruit of invisible work is introduced; later on, in the third station, the same theme will be deepened.

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Third station of the visit to the Museum: the former town hall and its square. The small restored building of the former town hall is where the images of the gestures of the agricultural work will be preserved and narrated to the visitors through an artistic intervention. Those movements, that have never changed over millennia of history, from the decorations on Greek vases to the photographs of our recent past, will be catalogued in a multimedia archive with the help of the older community members, who can still recall them from their youth. The Accademia dei Georgofili of Florence, the oldest agricultural academy in the world, will oversee the scientific direction of this archive. The main hall of the building, while normally being part of this image archive, will occasionally be used for community meetings.

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Fourth station of the visit to the Museum: the old oil mill. This monument is just below the main town’s square, right in the heart of the historical centre of Seggiano. The building spans over four floors, and due to its good state of conservation and to its historical value, the architectural interventions are only aimed at preserving and restoring the old structure as it was. Once again it is the potential and meaning of each site to guide both the architectural and museographical projects. The metal machinery of the mill evokes the atmospheres of Seggiano’s mining tradition, which are hinted at in the fifth station of the visit, just on the opposite side of the square.

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Fifth station of the visit to the Museum: the experience of olive oil today. The fifth station includes the commercial spaces that are essential to the economic survival of the museum, but is at the same time the space where the visitors can have a firsthand contact with the local community. Here the fruits of the local olive oil production are presented: on the ground floor of the former bank, is the Oleoteca or olive oil tasting

room, with a contemporary metal furniture recalls the machinery encountered in the fourth station; on the first floor, is the oil tasters’ formation and meeting space.

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Sixth station of the visit to the Museum: the yard of the church of Saint Bernardino of Siena. This very churchyard is a site of great importance in the life of Saint Bernardino, for it is here that he started preaching to the local community. The church holds and preserves the relics the Saint: while looking at them, the visitors are introduced to the issue of conservation as the result of care and passion in time, and, on the opposite, of abandonment leading to decay and, eventually, vanishing of any form of heritage. This theme leads the visitor to the last station of the museum, the Colombaio monastery, a place that once was the heart of the culture, art and spirituality of this territory, and that has been abandoned in the recent past, leaving nature free to recapture the ruins of this monumental site.

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Seventh station of the visit to the Museum: the “Colombaio” monastery. The convent rests on the slopes of the gentle hills just a few kilometers north of Seggiano, and faces directly onto the dale of Grosseto, which runs all the way to the Tyrrhenian Sea. The architectural intervention will be here aimed at freezing the current state of the ruins in time, by propping up what’s left of the former perimeter walls, and allowing vegetation to grow on supports so to prevent the plants from damaging the ancient structure. This is the site of silence, surrounded by nature: the artistic languages will have to bring out the natural elements of light, echoes, movements, while facing the complex task of interpreting and providing a contemporary translation of the masterpiece of Franciscan spirituality, the Cantico delle Creature (Canticle of the Sun).

The visit to the museum ends here, in a place surrounded by the very same landscape of which the olive oil tradition is born. The visitors can now move to the other relevant sites of Seggiano’s territory as its intensive olive groves, the XVII century ironwork, or the contempor ary sculpture garden Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri.

Even if the museum is still being worked on, and has only partially opened to the public, countless meetings have been organized to inform and involve the local community in the project. A public-private foundation was formed, Le Radici di Seggiano (The roots of Seggiano), that will coordinate the management and the projects of the museum, granting its independency from local politics. The alliances between the newly born Museo dell’Olivastra e della Terra di Seggiano and the best practices and institutions of the territory, have already proven to be fruitful: in the fall of 2012, the LINV will organize an international symposium on plant neurobiology in the spaces of the museum. The Accademia di San Luca (Academy of Saint Luke), the national academy for arts and architecture in Italy, has chosen Seggiano and its museum as theme and site for a workshop ("Segnare Disegnare Interpretare - Sign, draw, interpret", curated by Marisa Dalai Emiliani: "Drawing in relation to interpretation and museology. An itinerary throughout history") they organized earlier this year; they furthermore expressed an interest in founding a postgraduate formation school in the small rural town in Tuscany, where to learn

how to deal with local communities and heritages, how different professions could work together and how to exploit the incredible potential hidden in the Italian internal territories.

The research of Spazi Consonanti, that I've briefly presented in the paper through the ex amples of the two olive oil museums, never meant to be a solid theoretical corpus, but is rather the recollection of the very practical experience of the group, in dealing with the always surprising and rich heritage of the internal territories of Italy, often forgotten or underestimated, but laying at the very heart of the nation's history and culture.

This 20-year-long experience led us to the formulation of a "design method", which, to our great surprise at first, proved to be working beyond any expectation. The artists that worked with us, dazzled at first by such an atypical "down-to-earth" approach, discovered a new, less abstract, dimension of their work. But it was among the locals that the museums seemed to have made the strongest impression, since they found for the first time not only a recognition, but a celebration of their life, work and traditions.

It was only after the realization of the first local museums and exhibitions that, when wonder ing why these works were having such an unexpected appeal, we first realized we were doing nothing different than what has been done for centuries in every fresco cycle, in every relief, in every church and public building, for art can tell a very particular story - or in our case a very particular heritage - through a universal language (Borges, 2004), making the narration accessible to everybody, no matter where the user comes from, or what his age, ability or background is. It is now, and always have been the humble attention to the practical and cultural needs of a community, and to the always diverse character every place has, to make art and architecture great in Italy and in Europe throughout the centuries.

Fig.2 - town of Seggiano; roots suspension project, Museo dell'Olivastra e della Terra di Seggiano

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