Documentation of process:

Narrazioni da Museo a Museo

Starting in April 2016, Pigorini Museum in Rome launched ongoing activities aimed at the engagement of local communities for the SWICH collaborative exhibition. The project staff designed different activities to extend the participation to a wider audience, with particular regard to groups of high school students and migrant teenagers.


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Different visits and workshops with migrant teenagers took place at the studio of SWICH artist in residence H.H. Lim and at Pigorini Museum in collaboration with MAXXI (Museum of contemporary art and architecture, Rome), CivicoZero Center (Save the Children, Rome) and Aver Drom Center (Centro Astalli, Rome). Museum educators, social workers, curators and researchers carried out a series of art and narrative workshops with the teenagers. The collection of Pigorini Museum served as starting point for the re-interpretation and transformation of objects, making use of photography and self-narrative methodologies. Within these activities, Pigorini Museum organized a first public encounter with museum audiences and migrant teenagers on March 6, 2016 (“Migrant transformation from MAXXI to Pigorini Museum”). The museum also involved migrant teenagers and refugees in a program of visits in the museum’s storage to take a look “behind the scenes” of the museum.

A second series of activities has been launched with high school students from Rome that are participating in the “Alternanza Scuola-Lavoro” project promoted by the Italian Ministry of Education. This project helps young people to gain skills needed for entering the labour market and helps them to get experience "in the field". From February to June 2016 every week the museum hosted a different school. The students experienced the work behind the preparation of the exhibition captions. In a first step the students visited the museum, they learned about the communication strategies, witnessing the value of objects, their relationships and the change in their status. In a second step the students visited the halls freely and to analyzed the educational support material: panels, captions, pictures, writing down what they consider superfluous, redundant, incomprehensible and what they think is lacking, what they would like to read, what may be of interest to them. The comments were extremely rich and challenging. Providing this insight creates a closer relationship between the students and the materials whose communicative potential is enhanced.

The output (photographs – drawings – installations) of these activities were presented as part of the collaborative exhibition "The Making of a Point of View" in spring 2018.
Find out more about the exhibition HERE.

Photos by Mohamed Keita