Punctual as ever, the event that captures our attention completely returns on the second weekend of November: Museomix, from Ecuador to Senegal, passing through Belgium, France and Croatia…
Museomix is a collaborative cultural event and an international community. It takes place on the same weekend all over the world and involves three days of mental and physical teamwork, developing innovative proposals and creating prototypes for the public to test.
The first thing to point out is that no Italian museums will be involved in Museomix 2018. While the Italian community is already hard at work getting ready for Museomix Italian 2019, we couldn’t miss out on the opportunity to put ourselves to the test in a different role: the role of museomixer in one of the teams, working on the creation of a prototype and installing it during the three-day marathon.
How did it go? Our Elena Bertelli entered the international call for entries last June, putting herself forward as a communicator. She opted for the Mons Museum Cluster, where the Museomix Belgium community was organising the three-day marathon in not one but three museums:
- the Artoteque, which houses a collection that represents the heritage of the city (a unique place in Europe, acting as an archive, carrying out research and restoration and studying the local cultural heritage)
- the Musée du Doudou, developed to take visitors on an immersive journey through the legend of St George and the Dragon, and to illustrate the Ducasse de Mons Festival, which achieved UNESCO recognition in 2015
- the BAM (without exclamation marks, although it still seems to be a sign): the fine arts museum that, among other things, hosts a temporary exhibition by Niki De Saint-Phalle, where the museomixers will be able to move around freely.
Elena was picked together with another of our acquaintances, Alice Balerna, a former apprentice at BAM! who got carried away by her enthusiasm for Museomix and will be in Mons as a collections expert.
What will happen over the next few days? Friday 9 November will mark the start of their adventure, which they will be describing live on BAM!’s web and social media channels, both during the event and after their return from the marathon that will give them the opportunity to work with other professionals (makers, programmers, mediators and designers) to create and develop a prototype to be installed in the museum and tested by the public on Sunday afternoon, from 4:30 p.m.
While we’ll have our own correspondents in Belgium, we don’t know anything about what will be happening at the Musée de Normandie inside Caen castle, the Musée des Forces Armées Senegalaise in Dakar, the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille, the Musée d’Archéologie in Nice-Cimez, the Museo Interactivo de Ciencia in Quito in Ecuador, the Musée d’art et d’histoire and Villa Rohannec’h in Saint-Brieuc or the Tehnički muzej Nikola Tesla in Zagreb… if you’re as curious as us, all you have to do is look up the #Museomix hashtag on Twitter and watch Museomix’s YouTube channel to see the daily video reports about what these crazy museomixers are getting up to all over the world!
If you have already followed us over previous years, when we coordinated the Italian community and organised the various museums taking part, you will know what we’re talking about. However, if you know next to nothing about Museomix, click here to look back at past events.
