On Monday 15 April, the last day of the Archivissima archive festival, we will be bringing a workshop to Turin in an attempt to transform Museomix into a format that can also be applied to archives, assisted by professionals working in the field.
A free afternoon workshop to learn about Museomix and rethink it as a tool for facilitating archive access, open to archive workers, industrial museum staff, creative enterprises, fablabs, universities, companies, associations, independent professionals and students.
Organised by Museomix Italia and BAM! Strategie Culturali in partnership with Archivissima, Archiviomix is devoted to everyone interested in multidisciplinary approaches and participatory practices who want to take on the challenge of imagining a new format that can make new communities of professionals and enthusiasts engage with an archive, coming up with new methods for accessing, illustrating and using it.
Here at BAM! we experienced Museomix for the first time in 2015. Over the last few years we’ve brought the format to Italian museums together with Museomix Italia and IBC Emilia-Romagna, from Umbria to Romagna, passing through Tuscany, without ever losing sight of what was happening north of the Alps. We have also taken part in various international Museomixes. All this involvement has enabled us to get a different picture of institutions and to apply new design approaches in our work, measuring the results over time.
In the meantime, Museomix Italia has just completed a “Fai Community!” workshop tour of museums with the objective of helping them to open up to the local area and identify new forms of collaboration. Furthermore, applications are now being accepted for the 2019 edition, so Museomix Italia is working alongside museums that want to prepare their application to take part in this wonderful creative marathon. Thanks to its participatory and interdisciplinary methods, this event can actually attract new audiences to the museum and actively involve them in the development of tools that can be used for mediation, as well as changing the perception of it in the eyes of those who see museums as static, self-referential places.
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At the same time, Museomix has given the go-ahead for the creation of new formats in various European cities. Inspired by the three-day creative marathon structure, targeted at developing prototypes for improving museum usage and based on the work of various teams, lots of technology and the total backing of the organisation’s staff, other events have been created for organisations, even some that are very different from museums: from railway stations to libraries, and even a research centre on Mont Blanc called “CREA Mont-blanc”, which we wrote about here.
And this is how the “Archiviomix” workshop came about.
After taking part in Archivissima last year and learning more about the CSAC, the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione at the Università di Parma, we said to ourselves: collaborative and multidisciplinary practices can be applied to archives to facilitate access to them. All we need to do is identify the various ways in which archives differ from museums in order to adapt the format in the best possible way.
A decision was therefore made to invite all the cultural and archive sector workers to the Archivissima festival for an afternoon of discussion and brainstorming. This led to a number of interesting points and some new strategic and design approaches that can attract and actively engage new audiences in the world of archives.
Archiviomix will provide training, but will also feature practical activities. After an introduction to the context, the participants will be divided into groups and asked to discuss and explore subjects specific to the sector in order to get closer to the creation of a new format for remixing archives.
The programme:
14:30 – 15:15 presentation: what is Museomix? Why take it outside museums? 2019: setting our sights on remixing an archive!
15:15 – 15:30 Q & A
15:30 – 15:45 introduction to the workshop and group training
15:45 – 17:15 group work supported by mediators from the Museomix community
17:15 – 17:45 final report
17:45 – 18:15 comments and considerations
18:15 – 18:30 roadmap (forthcoming dates and deadlines)
How can I take part?
The workshop is free but places are limited. You will need to book on Eventbrite.
See the entire Archivissima programme!
Photo credits: Marco Caselli for Museomix Italia
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