After a full free Sunday of relax, the sixth day of the summer school opened by introducing the theme of the process of patrimonialisation of tangible and intangible heritage, reflecting on how institutional and informal organisations approach the valorisation of heritage. The questions that guided this reflection are: What is heritage? Who decides what is? Who has the right to acquire it?
In the morning Camille Faucourt, curator of the ‘Mobility and Intercultural’ collections at Mucem, Marseille, highlighted the social role of museums: they have informative and educational potential and an institutional task/mandate. Museums have the responsibility to choose what to acquire and what to exhibit. These choices implicate the offer a representation of a community and can contribute to shaping its identity. How to show and transmit this heritage, sometimes sensitive, to the museum's users?
If on the one hand the museum institution acquires ownership of the property and can thus return it to the population, on the other hand this process implies an ethical and political choice that informs an institutional vision on which it is necessary to question ourselves, every choice about what to make visible also implies overshadowing other possible representations. We had the opportunity to identify with the role of curators through the teamwork proposed by the lecturer, who put us in front of the question of what to show and how to insert it into a shared and co-constructed narrative.
If during the morning we were able to deepen the point of view of public museum institutions during the afternoon we were able to deal with projects that emerged from the commitment of civil society and constructed from below, which outside of institutional constraints assume the responsibility to perform the same function.
The first of these subjects is IBBY, an international organization thanks to which has been opened the first library on the island of Lampedusa. IBBY is not simply a space in which to read and borrow books, but a place where children learn how to take care of spaces and objects that are common goods and therefore do not belong to anyone in particular, but to the entire community. In order to overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers between new and old inhabitants of the island, is promoted the use of Silent Books, which avoid any kind of barrier. These books thus become a meeting space through which to travel and share, making children active readers. Unfortunately, the library's desire to be inclusive clashes with the denial of freedom of movement to new arrivals on the island, who are confined to the hotspot, children included.
The day ended in Porto M, where we met Giacomo Sferlazzo and attended his performance. The artist introduced us to the history of the island through different artistic languages able to connect traditional expressive channels, such as puppets and 'u cuntu', with elements of contemporaneity. In addition to this, at PortoM it is possible to visit a room where a collection of objects - small but full of meanings - belonging to migrants who arrived on the island is set up. The work of collecting, restoring and displaying the objects curated by the artist together with the Askavusa collective aims to make visitors aware of the context and of the different ways of remembering the stories of people in search of better living conditions.
We therefore find ourselves reflecting on the ownership of objects, on their narration and on which discourses are constructed from them and in what modalities. What relationship exists between the institutional world and with that of lower-level productions? Which narratives are most capable of restoring objects to their own history?