The possible utopia of the museum

Called upon by ICOM Italy and Fondazione Brescia Musei, Italian museums met to discuss their metamorphosis. Aware of being "community institutions" (Esposito) that increasingly look to society "outside their walls" by building systems of relations in the territories. At the centre of the reflection is the question of the social impact exerted by a museum in which, a bit like icebergs (Bonet), the collections are only the visible part compared to activities of mobilisation, cohesion and social capacitation which, although still little told, today represent the growing voice in contemporary museums. They have always been in transformation: from collections of the patron princes of the Renaissance, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they became real cultural institutions open first to an elite and then to the people, first "instruments of imperialism" in the bourgeois century and then in the social-democratic century public instruments of cultural growth, but always as institutions of "high" culture. Today, a new cycle is opening up for museums, they are increasingly being pushed to legitimise themselves as civic institutions that 'stand in the middle' between global changes and territorial cultural heritages. Told mostly when they act as attractors of tourist flows, museums today are above all places from which to try out a mediation between the kultur of places and local-global civilisation. A positioning that also reflects the relationship between changing social composition and its reflections in the increasing plurality and diversity of the publics that frequent them. The museum today is one of the institutional forms through which our societies 'remember' their future, an important theme especially today. Metaphorically, never before has there been such a need for a museum that recounts the historical links between Europe and the Atlantic, between Europe and the Urals, between the Europe of 'butter' and the Europe of 'oil'. Let us remember that Thomas Mann thought up the debate between kultur and civilisation, between German philosophy and the long Braudelian drifts in the aftermath of the world war. Getting in the middle of the philosophy of history today is increasingly necessary within the great leaps of time. The museum is a hyphen to unite kultur and civilisation with today's added challenge of a technological wave up to AI, which can empower the museum not only on the cultural industry front, but in research and education. The museum of tomorrow outlined in Brescia is a true functional autonomy, i.e. a community institution that performs a plurality of strategic functions. Three identities coexist in the contemporary museum. Firstly, it remains a factory of knowledge, a space for conservation/exhibition and increasingly also for research and training, part of an educational platform that produces cultural capacitation, both in terms of historical awareness of places and the growth of widespread human capacity to incorporate the technological leap. However, the museum is also the factory of the cultural industry and the machine of urban entertainment, the attractor and productive engine of tourism and eventology chains, part of urban tertiary industries. But thirdly, the museum becomes part of fundamental economies, an infrastructure of quality of urban life and territories, an essential part of an agenda of reproduction and social cohesion. In weaving and reweaving social cohesion in the fundamental economies, which lie in the social sea beneath the museum iceberg, a "heterotopic place" (Foucault evoked by Barreto) is made to emerge and narrate, the museum generating reproductive goods. This new civic role can be interpreted by large metropolitan museums through the long networks that unite world-cities, or even in small territorial community museums. For Italy, I find particularly interesting the trajectory of the museum-functional autonomy in the context of medium-sized cities that today unite historical heritage, institutions of industrial civilisation and flows of tourism. There, the potential of the museum as a collective institution, to be told beyond just the important technicalities of evaluation and economic impact, is very evident. Museums, too, are no longer, like the social sector, the third sector of culture. For them, too, the time is ripe for a third narrative beyond the dichotomy of the museum only as a public-state institution or as a private corporate institution. A tale that is not storytelling, but reflexive capacity to count more in a national-international network like ICOM that becomes collective intelligence of the territories. The museum is increasingly a heterotopic place, a place of a possible utopia in the here and now. A possible utopia evoked in the conclusions of the proceedings by President Lanzinger and President Bazoli.