Comune di Savona – The city’s museums and the relationship with its population

Savona faces an important challenge: rebuilding the links and relations between local people and cultural institutions, still often perceived as distant and closed off with respect to the needs of the community.

Today, throughout Europe, museums (together with libraries and other civic cultural centres) are becoming the most interesting cultural participation laboratories: places of active citizenship and used for co-designing public policies, under the banner of a new model of cultural and community welfare.

The new council’s willingness to move in this direction requires a strategic first step: building mutual understanding, common ground between museums and local people.

This is why the Comune is promoting a survey that aims for two results: reconstructing a database of current visitors to Savona’s museums, and planning meetings between museums and local people, in the conviction that every audience analysis and every exchange of information must also be an opportunity for communication and relationships, to be treated with care and empathy.

The process conceived and developed by BAM! together with the Associazione Amici di Casa Jorn  is divided into three phases.

In the first phase, we investigated the link between museums in Savona and their visitors from the museums’ point of view, by means of a questionnaire and one-to-one interviews: what do they know about their local visitors? How do they monitor them? What do they offer them?

The second phase turned the viewpoint around, targeting local people directly through a communication campaign and a questionnaire targeted at the people of Savona: do they know their local museums? Do they visit them? Do they feel part of their cultural identity?

In this campaign, BAM! wanted to take the most intriguing objects out of the museums and let them speak so that they could express an adjective in response to the question “Ciao Savonese, come ti senti oggi?” (“Hello Savona resident, how are you feeling today?”): “Great classic” responds the blue-and-white vase from the Museo della Ceramica di Savona.

This is one example of the many subjects of a customised communication campaign for each participating museum, which makes local people feel like protagonists and makes fun of frescoes, precious church treasures, sculptures and computers with the addition of a graphic flavour inspired by the spiritual world of tarot cards.

Lastly, during the third phase, BAM! investigated the “non-visitors” to Savona’s museums: what is stopping them? What barriers do they encounter to entering the museums? Why do they feel removed from their cultural identity?