Lucia
Giardino

Since the late 1990s, he has taught art history and courses focusing on the languages and communication of contemporary art at international academic institutions and at the Academies of Fine Arts in Rome and Florence. Her international experience, including teaching at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and research at the Harlem Studio Fellowship and Residence Unlimited in New York, has helped to shape her professional identity. She assigns a fundamental role to art as a tool for mediation, knowledge and social change, especially in disadvantaged contexts and rural areas, and focuses many of her contributions to conferences, seminars and publications on these themes (including the recent Arte e Spazio Pubblico, edited by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture and the Fondazione Scuola dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali, Silvana Editoriale, 2023). She was Chair of the School of Fine Arts at the Florence University of the Arts (FUA), where she directed and curated the artist-in-residence and exhibition programme F_AIR – Florence Artist in Residence (2011–2014).  Since 2007, together with Federico Bacci, she has curated and directed the GuilmiArtProject, an artist-in-residence programme based on the practice of cohabitation, which she first learned about at the Scuola di Specializzazione di Storia dell’Arte in Siena, directed by Enrico Crispolti, and which she completed in 2014. 

The comparison between metropolitan and global art systems and local art systems is a topic of interest that she has addressed in two master’s programmes: one on the management, promotion and communication of cultural heritage and cultural institutions at the University of Florence (2001) and another at Sole24 (2020).

Content

The course facilitates an understanding of the museum’s mission and the nature and role of its collections, with a view to analysing current communication and marketing strategies for the promotion and sustainability of cultural heritage and acquiring the relevant skills. The course aims to illustrate the complexity of the concept of the ‘public’, which is no longer to be understood as a passive consumer, but rather as a multifaceted creator of content, a facilitator of visitor journeys and a driver of change for the museum. The museum thus becomes a dynamic entity and a ‘system of relationships at the service of society and its sustainable development’ (ICOM 2019). ICOM’s 2022 revised definition of a museum further emphasises the accessibility and inclusiveness of museums, where the community participates in the provision of diverse experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and the sharing of knowledge. 

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Provide an overview of national and international museography and museology and identify the most significant examples that have marked turning points or contributed to the evolution of museum disciplines and approaches
• Describe the most significant case studies of museum development in the current era and identify their strengths
• Identify the possible types of museum storytelling and their dissemination channels (e.g., science and research communication; education and schools; other specific audience segments, by age group, interest, inclination, etc.)
• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of a cultural institution and contextualise them from a smart communication perspective
• Identify traditional, digital and technological methods and tools for promoting and communicating the museum, its collections and its role in relation to specific objectives 
• Put the above into practice through exercises, with a view to potentially developing an integrated communication strategy for a museum or any other cultural institution

As this is a two-year course, it requires participation in a specific project, which serves as the backbone of the course, as well as the practical application of the general scientific and regulatory content of the subject, which is analysed during the lectures. The selected project will focus on enhancing and promoting the Cherry Ecomuseum in Celleno (Province of Viterbo). Officially recognised in June 2023, the Cherry Ecomuseum was established not only to protect and promote the unique characteristics of the local cherry, a product for which the area has been renowned since a 15th-century document, but also to heal a rift in the town’s fabric caused by events in the early post-war period, which affected the subsequent life of the municipality of Celleno, weakening its social and economic fabric, but also revealing new opportunities for cultural storytelling. The creation of the ecomuseum embodies the desire of the local authority and the community to heal this rift by looking beyond the recent past and rediscovering much more distant aspects of Celleno’s history in order to put them to use in the present. Therefore, the ecomuseum does not represent a static, unchanging local area; rather, it aims to serve as a platform where new local initiatives and partnerships can drive interregional, national and international collaborations and contributions.

The specific objectives of this course will be:

• To provide an overview of the presence and variety of ecomuseums in Italy and abroad
• To be able to outline the general strengths and weaknesses of ecomuseums and of the course’s case study 
• To be able to identify the specific strengths and weaknesses of our course’s case study through
  1. Scientific study and research
  2. Marketing tools
  3. On-site testing of experiential routes
• Identify and develop short-, medium- and long-term operational proposals for the aforementioned areas of curation, education, logistics, production, fundraising and communication
• Ideally, to create a comprehensive and integrated cultural product for the Cherry Ecomuseum

Examination
The examination will take the form of an oral test and will focus on assessing the pathway and the actions implemented for the annual project. Students will also be required to provide the core reading list, with a particular focus on the communication and promotion topics covered during the course, as well as sections from certain supplementary readings agreed with the lecturer. 

Core reading list

• Lida Branchesi, Valter Curzi, Nicolette Mandarano (eds.), Comunicare il museo oggi. Dalle scelte museologiche al digitale, Skira, 2016
• Piernicola Maria di Iorio, Ecomusei e arte contemporanea. Raccontare la memoria per vivere il futuro, Gangemi, 2022.
• Lucia Cataldo, Marta Paraventi, Il museo oggi. Modelli museo logici e museografici nell’era della digital transformation, Logical and museographic museum models in the era of digital transformation, Hoelpi, 2023