Ritorno al Futuro: cultural participation means integration

In 2019, Nesta Italia decided to take part in the Compagnia di San Paolo’s CivICa. Progetti di Cultura e Innovazione Civica call for entries, in order to meet the needs of citizens with a migrant background in the cities of Genoa and Turin. The idea was to bring together a number of third-sector associations working with these issues on the front line (Generazione Ponte in Turin and Nuovi Profili in Genoa) and to get some local museums interested in a cultural participation project.

The project being outlined needed a specific moment of real civic activation: based on the experience of the Museomix creative marathon format, the Museomix Italia community and BAM! were entrusted with the task of launching a territorial activation process, a real ground for comparison out of which new mediation tools, new synergies and a multicultural community around museums could be created.

Between the time it was conceived and the moment it took its first steps, Ritorno al Futuro experienced a major setback with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, with museums being closed or only open to small groups for many months. Despite this, the project’s long range certainly made it possible to achieve the set objectives.

The Generazione Ponte and Nuovi Profili associations organised numerous visits to the museums in Turin and Genoa and guided tours of the cities. These initiatives, aimed at citizens with a migrant background, have always sought to engage them and provide them with a wide-ranging account of cultural heritage, in dialogue with the stories and identities of the participants themselves, as well as promoting moments of informal exchange and encouraging people to return to cultural attractions by giving away the Card Musei.

Museomix Italia and BAM! contributed to the second part of the project. In spring 2021 they set up an online workshop that involved around twenty-five people from the Museomix community, who, together with Generazione Ponte, planned an initiative designed to promote the activation of citizens with a migrant background (and others) in the co-creation of tools for recounting and mediating the city of Turin’s museum heritage.

This led to the creation of the Museo Fuori! multimedia workshop. Ten days of activities, during which three teams of participants with different professional profiles, accompanied by facilitators, firstly absorbed as much as possible from the context and the museums and then worked on the design and prototyping of a cultural mediation tool for taking the museum heritage outside the buildings that normally house the collections, into the city. The themes on which the teams worked were devised with the museums involved, the Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano and the Fondazione Accorsi-Ometto, and concerned identity, exchange and multicultural integration.

Museomix Italia and BAM! coordinated all the activities for the implementation of Museo Fuori: from the conditions for the creation of a multicultural community centred around the city’s heritage to the actions that led to the public presentation of three prototypes to the city and which saw the participation of hundreds of citizens.

The proposed activities organised by BAM! included a workshop on audiences, to stimulate more focused work on specific target segments.

Museo Fuori! involved numerous local players in the role of partners. The spaces of Fablab Torino were used for the actual making of the prototypes, but Officine Creative Torino also hosted a plastic recycling workshop. During the prototype design process, the teams were also accompanied by experts from DAM Bros Robotics, Atelier Mobile, Hackability and, on the content side, the association Equilibri d’Oriente and Migrantour.