БРУНИ ИЛАРИЯ (Музейный комплекс Террачины, Италия). «Избирательная память»: музей и его прошлое
ILARIA BRUNI (Terracina (LT). Museum Complrx, Italy). “Selective memory”: A Museum and Its Past
The presentation will examine a trend within the Italian Museum Studies, closely tied to the History of Classical Archaeology and the Antiquarian, which is gradually disappearing, the “selective memory” of the past: cultural-ideological result of 20th century pre-, inter-, and post-war period, also characterised by extensive debates about Museums’ mission in the whole Europe.
The case study presented here, representative of a subregional district of southern Latium is related to the Archaeological Civic Museum “Pio Capponi” of Terracina, city 100 kilometers south of Rome. Throughout the analysis of this Museum various aspects will be discussed, included museological and museographical technical and administrative issues such as exhibition design and communication strategies in search of the common thread and main focus: protracted ideological characteristics and propaganda as nostalgia of the past and reactivation of historical, political and anthropological phenomena.
The Civic Museum was founded in 1894 and the evolution of the fittings until 1990s in the various locations, can be seen in photos, inventories and period letters, with chronological and thematic displays. The rooms of the Museum are a storage-antiquarium for scholars and travelers between the late 19th and early 20th century and stood as little more than a makeshift shelter in the 1920s and 1940s. Between the 1950s and 1990s there’s an attempt to recover local identity after the post-war looting and state requisitions, until 2016 when the City Museum was founded.
The central theme of criterion for selecting the archaeological material to be exhibited has been, since the beginning, “the past that we choose to tell”. This “selective memory” is identifiable, through an “ethical” approach – borrowing the definition from anthropology — and categories of the “emic” type. They can be summarized in: “the collected and preserved” – what has been deemed necessary for memory transmission by the local community = historical value; “the hidden and scattered” — what was deemed usable on the national and international underground antiques market = economic value; “the representative” — identifying factors of the local community selected from historical and artistic moments = social value; “the unrepresentative” – evidence of the archaeological past of little monumental importance, such as material classes containing objects of everyday use, deemed unworthy of display or narration, stored in depots.
The Museum has “collected and preserved”, selecting the monumental Roman aspects from its own past. It celebrated the so-called “Romanolatry” with “white archaeology” but it has omitted the material culture of everyday life, of prehistoric, protohistoric, medieval and Renaissance phases, although it is well documented.
Is the Museum a place to forget or a place to remember?
классическая археология, музееведение, антиквариат, ностальгия, пропаганда
classical archaeology, museum studies, antiquarian, nostalgia, propaganda