Theoretical Introduction

In the last twenty years the debate on museology and museography has been mapped by engaging challenges, in an attempt to respond to new instances; for example, is possible to interpret, narrate and represent historic phenomena which have involved millions of random people, figures on the edge of extraordinary happenings, people who frequently left no significant traces of their passing, neither material nor documentary? To what extreme level of abstraction is it possible to drive the thematization of a museum and an exhibition? Can museums and events be realised with few or no objects, or those which are not original, working on an immaterial heritage, using audiovisual supports, creating sound and smell installations, re-elaborating information gathered from disparate sources, united by their absence of physicality?

The answers provided to these questions have often been positive, observing the results of projects dedicated to women, infancy, migration, slavery, the holocaust, wars, work, colonisation, oral cultures, minorities, biodiversity, climatic change, human rights, fantasy or peace, and not forgetting experiments held in the science and discovery centres, in children museums and in various temporary exhibitions.

These experiences confirm the possibility of using anti-epics, made of choral voices, anonymous faces and collective movements – where the memorable does not coincide with heroic, nor the historic with the individual – which require unusual abilities and arrangements.

In fact it is not easy to dramatise narrations without recognisable protagonists, precise references, documentary traces and magnetic objects with which to anchor the path through the exhibition, ensuring that the shows are sensational, intriguing and persuasive without losing a historic rigour, intellectual honesty and respect for professional ethics.

Notwithstanding this in the last years museology and museography have managed successfully to bring to the centre of our attention themes and phenomena whose grandeur, sometimes tragic, comes from the sum of myriads of banal occurrences, modest lives, insignificant objects and multitudes of unrecognisable second leads, like drops of water in the ocean in our great history.

This attention is to some extent one of compensation, stimulated originally by the orientations of the new social sciences, subject to Marxist approaches, and by cultural studies, which from ideological conditionings have opened a fertile discussion, favouring the musealisation of themes and phenomena believed unworthy of attention until just a decade or so ago.

Nineteenth and twentieth century museology often celebrated the histories, memories and the legacies of winners, privileging isolated happenings and eminent personalities, evolved civilisations and great works, in an representative and officially scientific logic, founded on visible objects, clear chronologies, certain judgements and unchangeable hierarchies, which have composed the benchmarks of the traditional form of arrangement, narration and museum representation.

However museums have shared the predilections and idiosyncrasies of academic disciplines of reference as judges and certifiers of the cultural value of works and men, historic events, and social phenomena, setting the canons of intergenerational transferability; in the majority of cases that which was judged as unworthy of being conserved disappeared, often forever, from the limits of conscience and memory.

In recent decades the way which we perceive change and receive the sense and depth of history has changed; we live in a super-present which escapes us and the objects, which a collective memory would like to pass on, belong to an ever closer past, ever less shared.

At the same time the fences have fallen which divided, and often mutually protected, one another, high and low culture, elite and popular taste, originals and reproductions, analogous and digital objects, in a process which has lead to a revision of the principles for exhibitions which have been used for centuries.

This situation has involved, at times obliged, museums and cultural institutions to consider epochs, collections and themes almost contemporary, providing interpretative structures which don’t have the courage or pretentiousness to present lasting judgments and offer unequivocal readings. Single objects and their placement within a rigid system of classifiers are no longer fundamental, but rather insertion in open narrative contexts, which don’t provide a canonical reading but suggest diverse interpretations.

The visitor, once a passive receiver of disciplinarian verbs, has become an active subject, to seduce and conquest, leaving him a free choice and, to some extent, never the last word.

For this reason the sense of sight is no longer privileged; we discover and interact with all the senses, and for this the institutes of the new generation, above all those without “masterpieces” and exceptional objects, produce experiences, emotions and sensations, and supply information and knowledge in diverse formats to those earlier ones.

This cognitive dimension can be applied to themes which in the past weren’t conceivable: it is not by chance that from the seventies, at the same time as the proliferation of studies on the defeated, deviants, popular culture and the disadvantaged classes, on those on the margins of the selective scope of attention of high culture of the nineteenth-twentieth century, that they have multiplied their forces to make up for lost time and place under the museum reflectors that which had been left in the dark for centuries: millions of objects and individuals, without authors or provenance, but nonetheless protagonist of great happenings, which the Museum of the 20th century intends to make known, remember and respect.

Why the twentieth century?

Chatting with my children I was asked the following types of questions: when our greatgrandparents were alive were the Italians short or tall, thin or fat? How long and how did they live? How many children did they have? Did they marry many times? What jobs did they do? How many cars and televisions did they have? Where did they go on holiday?

In their innocence these questions provoked answers almost incredible for children who have grown up in the certainty that computers, mobile phones and electrical appliances have existed since the beginning of Mankind, submerged in a super-present which doesn’t distinguish between recent and distant past, between time and times. A computer from 1979, a motorbike from 1986, a mobile phone from 1998 or an episode of the first edition of Big Brother seem as ancient to us as Pleistocene fossils or a helmet from the bronze age: today pre-history begins the day before yesterday.

On the other hand the sense of vertigo is justified by the acceleration of the processes of change; in Italy in 1901 the level of illiteracy was 56% (in 2001 1.5%) nd that of malnutrition was 30% (today 33% of Italians are overweight and 9% obese); life expectancy was 47 for men and 52 for women (today respectively 78.9 and 84.2); an average family was composed of 6.2 members (today 2.5) with 4.2 children (today 1.4) although 1 child in 6 didn’t reach its first birthday (today 1 in 200); the first four causes of death were influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis and gastroenteritis (today 14% of Italians have depression and 18% allergies); the level of homicides was 9.5 per 100 000 persons (today 1.5); in 110 years average male height has increased by 10 cm, from 165 to 177, and weight by over 10kg.

In March of 1946 women received the right to vote; in 1948 in 100 employed people 45 worked in the primary sector, 30 in the second and 25 in the third (today the figures are 5%, 28% and 67% respectively); in 1949 the first television images were transmitted (today an average person watches 3.45 hours a day in front of 32 million TVs); in 1951 35.1% of families had piped water and 40.5% an inside bathroom; in 1954 there were 342,000 cars on the roads (today 36 million); in 1958 3 out of 100 people had a washing machine, and 18 out of 100 had a refrigerator, between 1961 and 1976 around 3 million Italians emigrated (today 1 newborn in 6 has a foreign mother); from 1972 to today the number of marriages and births has halved; in 1973 the last epidemic of cholera and in 1981 honour killing was made illegal...

Is it possible to discuss the changes which have happened in a century without falling into nostalgic pathos or radical verbosity, whilst protecting the pluralism of historiographic interpretations and supplying instruments which guarantee the most complete freedom of analysis? Can a measurement be given to change without a shield of ideologies and prejudices, instead helping the interlocutor to form an opinion? Is there any sense in narrating, even in comparative terms, a national history of a century in which the distinctions between global and local have disappeared, between totalitarianism and atomic, space travel and www, wars and massacres, technological revolutions and scientific progress, demographic changes and social transformations of an entity never before seen in the history of Man?

The answer is positive, but although Italy has over 4,500 museums, little space has been devoted to the extra-artistic themes of the twentieth century – whose history is notoriously ignored- compared to what occurs abroad, where the museums are always more numerous as are the archives, cultural centres and exhibitions dedicated to the social, economic, work, technology, industry and consumption histories of the last century.

A similar inattention is seen for the cultural heritage of the twentieth century, which in Italy has not yet found the attention that this legacy of extraordinary value enjoys beyond the national borders, as can be witnessed by the striking number of museums and exhibitions dedicated to cinematography, television production, photography, recording and radio, publishing and journalism, design and architecture, to fashion and publicity, cartoons and graphic art, and which have recognised the dignity of a museum for cultural goods produced in the twentieth century.

From this arises the need to fill this gap, using a theme of fundamental importance – the Italian history of the twentieth century – in a place which is a symbol of the twentieth century, with a clear mission: to meet the past, understand the present and trust in the future.

Why Mestre?

Whoever lived through the end of the last century could observe the acceleration of the processes of modernisation – sometimes contradictory and unfinished – that often happened with such speed as to impede comprehension, acceptance and the memorising of what was happening, especially in an ancient country such as Italy, where such processes were historically slower and geographically not homogeneous; if we confront Italy in 1971 and in 2001 it is almost impossible to believe that what has happened could have happened.

The Veneto and the Venetian mainland represent in this sense two limited cases, two paradigmatic places, two extreme workshops, where through the good and the bad the advent of modernity and the prevailing of post-modernity have been manifested with a speed, a strength and a possibly unequalled power, at least in national terms. Here the big twentieth century transformations, urbanisation, industrialisation, secularisation, the expansion of the service industry, emigration, the demographic transition, socio-professional changes, modifications of the landscapes and territories, just to cite a few, have developed late but furiously, taking on a frenzy, a magnitude, a comprehension and a rapidity elsewhere absent; in few other parts of Europe, certainly of Italy, did these changes manifest themselves with such force and the same violence, the same hopes and fears, the same joy and pain.

On the Venetian mainland, between 1912 and 1975, the urban population more than doubled every twenty years, where the industrial centre of Marghera, risen magnificently from the marshes from 1917 and which came to create jobs for over 35,000 workers; the Veneto, the region with the largest migratory balance in Italy, in the last ten years it has become the second region in terms of numbers of resident foreigners; the Mestre ringroad, inaugurated in 1972, become in fifteen years the most used piece of motorway in Europe, whilst the tiny airport opened at Tessera in 1958 is now the third in Italy in terms of passenger volumes, serving a territory whose entrepreneurial capacity is unequalled in Europe, with a per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) identical to cities such as Toronto and Barcelona and a growth rate analogous to that of Stockholm and London.

Which other place, then, might symbolise in such a meaningful way the victories and defeats, conquests and losses, the virtues and vices of the Italian twentieth century? Where else could an analogous coherence be found between a museum theme and its territorial context, if not in Mestre?

The themes

Once the reasons for the setting for the museum are explained, it is opportune to justify those of the thematization; in the permanent exhibition of the Museum of the 20th century five principle themes will be addressed, coinciding with the large demographic, social, economic, town planning, environmental and cultural transformations which have happened in Italy in the twentieth century, where the temporary exhibitions concentrate on themes which in Italy have not yet roused interest in the way they have abroad and which I listed in the second paragraph.

The permanent exhibition will be constructed editing the “cultural goods” produced in the twentieth century, or rather printed and cartographic works (newspapers, journals, posters, publicity, postcards, books, engravings, maps, etc.), photographs, sound (radio recordings, radio documentaries, oral histories, interviews, sound recordings, voices and sounds, etc.), audio-visual (documentaries, private recordings), television programmes, materials produced by companies, unions, films, T.V. news, etc.) which will be joined by objects, original or reproductions (plastics, machines, scientific instruments, daily items, animated reconstructions and in 3D, reproductions of various types, etc.), to realise reconstructions in which you can immerse yourself in spaces and environments, interactive installations using smell, sound and senses, videos of all kinds.

These ways of arranging exhibitions will strengthen the evocative, narrative and emotional dimensions of the reconstructions, giving special attention to all the senses: not only sight but also touch, smell, hearing, taste, all stimulated in visiting “paths” structured in a non-linear way. At the same time, the centrality of the contents in digital format (fixed and moving images, 3D reconstructions, sounds and voices etc.) will consent the periodic updating and modification of the exhibits of the permanent exhibition, which can be added to by the visitor himself by means of web instruments 2.0, in order to approach a pluralistic, multidisciplinary, multi-sensory and interactive conscience, which stimulates in the visitors critical consideration, curiosity and desire to learn.