Enhancing the value of the Venice City Museums through new technologies
The goal of the project is to enhance MUVE, the Venice Civic Museums, through the use of new technologies and the digitization of content, make the collections more accessible and usable, and develop learning paths, taking into account the real context in which the museums are placed. The actors involved were the Director of Area 2 of the Venice Civic Museums, the Head of Human Resources of the Venice Civic Museums, the Head of the Natural History Museum and Head of Educational Activities of the Venice Civic Museums, a founding partner of Fablab and coordinator of the Fablab project.
The Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia (MUVE) is an institution that includes 12 museums: Palazzo Ducale, Museo Correr, Torre dell’Orologio, Ca’ Rezzonico Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Palazzo Mocenigo – Centro Studi di Storia del Tessuto e del Costume, Casa di Carlo Goldoni, Ca’ Pesaro – Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Palazzo Fortuny, Museo del Vetro di Murano, Museo del Merletto di Burano and Museo di Storia Naturale. It is a private entity that manages a public heritage with a single founding partner represented by the City of Venice. In addition to its traditional activities, the network of autonomous museums carries out a range of different cultural services: training, education, temporal events, fostering dialogue with the territory and its public.
In the course of SACHE‘s planning, the Foundation has expressed the need to link its cultural production to the territory, made up of industries, private entities, citizens, etc. It would like to be an engine of change and innovation for the city, acting on both a productive and social level, also attracting private sponsorships to convey its mission.
Fablab Venezia Srl is inspired by the extension of the Center of Bits and Atoms, FabLab, of Boston University, and was founded with the intention of developing its values of digital fabrication and computational processes also in Veneto (https://www.fablabvenezia.org/chi-siamo/). It deals with the development of creative, entrepreneurial and innovation projects, also carrying out educational activities, working to be a reference point for innovative practices, and the development of new projects through digital fabrication. It has important equipment and technological knowledge and, as a fablab, is conceived as an interactive reality that collaborates with other actors to share projects and knowledge, including professionals, artisans, companies, agencies and public administrations, students and schools.
The project was conceived based on the MUVE Foundation’s need to develop innovative and inclusive museum paths and integrated solutions. The result is a project designed to reshape a high-value museum space and bring it closer to people with visual impairments, stimulating their tactile sphere through the use of 3D reproductions of artworks created by Fablab that people can touch and experience through senses other than sight. This choice is accompanied by the formulation of training workshops for museum workers so that they know these technologies and are able to communicate them to the public.
This project is built on the value of inclusion, with a focus on inclusive communication for people with disabilities and children: new technologies are the means by which a new audience can enjoy museum heritage (Neighbor, 2021). From this formulation, taking into account the need to bring cultural production closer to the territory through new forms of contamination, conceiving museums as engines of innovation capable of fostering new forms of collaboration that affect the local productive and social fabric and the need to diversify the public, an active partnership was born.
Fablab and the Civic Museums of Venice have begun a multi-year collaboration, starting with:
- The digitization of the Capitello dei Mestieri and the reproduction of the Doge’s Palace: they created a functional 3-D model that increased enjoyment for the public and made it possible to activate learning paths for children and people with special needs such as the blind and visually impaired, with the aim of enhancing the connection between people and heritage.
- The reconstruction of a model of the Ducal Palace aimed at tactile enjoyment, making the roughness and complexity enjoyable even by blind and visually impaired people.
- The proposal of digital solutions for the reconstruction of relief panels capable of returning Jacopo De Barberi’s engravings preserved at the Correr Museum in Venice to a wide audience.
Through this partnership, technology is used as a means of social inclusion, enabling a new form of heritage representation and presentation, and traditional architectural barriers are broken down in favor of a more innovative solution based on the exchange of knowledge and expertise. We can consider this collaboration to be very fruitful from several points of view and a good example of how museums and businesses can merge into a strategic partnership, which brings long-term benefits and to society at large.