MUA-Musei Accoglienti-Project

Europe has a historical habit with multicultural societies, but today's demand for interculture plans to go further, to create new social arrangements in which exchange and mutual enrichment are the key to balance, growth, justice social and sustainability. Cultural operators of any district, discipline, level, must accept the challenges and the invitations to work to acquire or increase knowledge, visions, skills, intercultural attitudes, for, between and with old and new citizens and between "professionals" . In recent years, our country has welcomed a large number of women, men and children fleeing war, denial of civil rights and poverty. Our cities and our arrival territories have shown an extraordinary ability to manage the emergency, with a response, not only from the health authorities, the police, the local administrations, but also from the world of associations, communities and individual citizens. The biggest challenge is to integrate foreigners, and Italian cultural institutions, large and small, from schools to libraries, from theaters to museums, have long been at the forefront to ensure this patient and widespread work throughout the territory, often with difficulties and great sacrifices. MUA-Musei Welcoming is a project promoted by the Department of Tourism and Cultural Industry of the Puglia Region through the Apulian Public Theater and was created by ECCOM, CIR - Italian Council for Refugees and 34 ° Fuso together with the Castromediano Museum of Lecce and the Ribezzo Museum of Brindisi. It was a training and experimentation path, aimed at museum operators and migrants from the Apulian territory, which aimed at building innovative skills and practices to make cultural heritage more usable and accessible. Two experiments were initially planned in the biblio-museum poles of Brindisi and Lecce. The main purpose of the training was to share with the participants the evolution in the context of European cultural policies of concepts such as the development of access (understood as physical, geographical, economic and cultural access); participation (not only in cultural activities in the strict sense but also in decision-making processes); of the representation in cultural institutions (and museums in particular) of dominant cultures but of all the cultural (and intercultural) expressions present in society. It is a path that led to the definition of audience development understood as a strategic and dynamic process of creating relationships between cultural institutions, aimed at the full realization of access, participation and representation. One of the strategic axes for the implementation of audience development is the use of technology: with this in mind, the MUA project has chosen to use digital storytelling to encourage active participation and the representation of its own cultural instances and visions by of the participants in the project. Words and the story are the first tool that human beings invented to understand the world. Similarly, telling one's story is a fundamental tool to give meaning to one's life and experiences, often the latter become intelligible only after being communicated to others. Narration is also a political tool: nation states have their own narrative of origins, all major political movements have an ideology and slogans that define their action. For these two reasons, narration is fundamental. Digital storytelling adds to the power of narration the digital element that favors immediacy and creativity through the use not only of words but also of images and sounds. Finally, the digital storytelling laboratory is a collective experience: collective reflections introduce new epistemological visions, witnessed by the vision of collective intelligences, of the third space, of the entanglement of relationships between cultures, of maps to orient thought or proposals of use of narration as an anthropological research tool for knowledge not only of a local community, but also of intentions and values. Funding by the "Assessorato all’Industria Turistica e Culturale" Puglia Region. Partners: - Museo Provinciale Sigismondo Castromediano, Lecce - Museo archeologico provinciale Francesco Ribezzo, Brindisi - CIR - Consiglio Italiani - 34° Fuso