As part of our way of understanding and proposing museums as “hypertexts”, two important special projects will take place this year. The first comes from a pilot initiative, ‘My’ Correr. An intercultural approach to the Museum, created last year by our department around the important theme of intercultural dialogue, in the context of Art Clicks, a training and participatory planning workshop organised in Rome by MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo and ECCOM – European Centre for Cultural Organisation and Management, and with the support of Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The second re-proposes a collaboration with the Paper Technology course at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia to enhance and promote the creative work of teachers and students. Both, as always, are aimed at an active use of the museum as didactic space, but also as opportunities for new encounters, relationships, interpretations.
Museums, interculture and school
The migratory processes taking place at a global level, so varied and dynamic, also stimulate the world of education to new approaches and needs, given the growing presence in classes of children with direct or family-based stories of migration. At their school desks students can learn about cultural and religious diversity, overcome mutual distrust and feel part of a plural society. In this important educational task of active citizenship, the museum also plays a role as a place for listening, stories, meetings and relationships, to be constructed “through” the exhibited works, with the aim of fostering a process of dialogue, in which people of different cultures can share an experience of common discovery, overcoming the boundaries of belonging and promoting culture as a factor of social cohesion.
In this context, the ‘My’ Correr pilot project involved a group of migrants in a participatory process of dialogue and reinterpretation of the cultural heritage of the Museum. After careful training, the “new” citizens have developed “narratives” of works from the museum, selected by them and reinterpreted with new meanings and new points of view. Through their stories intertwined with those of the selected works, these unusual “storytellers” have produced a circuit in the Museum in an intercultural key, to share new knowledge and interpretations with its visitors.
From the intercultural experience of ‘My’ Correr… we have developed two projects: one aimed at teachers who live these complexities on a daily basis; the otheraimed at students and particularly native speakers of a foreign tongue, who are about to take the junior secondary school certificate exam.
The project is planned as a pilot activity for the 2019/20 school year.
For information education@fmcvenezia.it
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