#SAMA did not miss the appointment of the last webinar organised by the #SMARTProject and #ALDA on the subject of the museum, digitisation and active participation in the audience.
On 26 May, in fact, the webinar "Silent Play: Cultural heritage and new practices of participation through theatre" was hosted by the Centro Teatrale La Piccionaia and the virtual museum Dolom.it.
This webinar focuses on the theme of theatrical possibilities and on the practice of silent play as an active modality that allows the active participation of the audience and, in parallel, opens a discourse on the promotion and protection of material and immaterial cultural heritage.
The thread of the webinar was directed by Centro Teatrale La Piccionaia, an Italian theatre social cooperative (Vicenza), active since 1975 in the world of theatre experimentation with socio-cultural aims for residents. As in the case of SAMA, the aim of La Piccionaia is to create a participatory micro-community under the banner of art as a binding element of social cohesion.
The main theme of the readings was the practice of silent play, a modality halfway between theatre, performance and audio-guide that consists in offering the spectator an interactive show in which the public often has the possibility of being positively active.
Carlo Presotto, artistic director of La Piccionaia, in this sense, emphasises the theme of involvement and the current need to transform cultural information into physical experience, as well as to change general interest into personal involvement of all generations. Through the use of silent play, La Piccionaia has in fact created a series of immersive theatre performances without defined spaces that allow the spectator to be the central focus of the narrative.
Being part of the performance
Only through participatory activation can engagement and socio-cultural compromise be achieved: an example of this is the project Unforeseen Visions - The Invisible City, in which the aim is to re-evaluate the urbanism of peripheral neighbourhoods in an artistic-museum key through the stories, experiences and results produced by the residents of the neighbourhood. This is exactly the participatory approach that SAMA has been pursuing for the last 9 years!
Paola Rossi, a member of La Piccionaia, continues Presotto's discourse by exploring the modalities of silent play, based on the physical-urban exploration of everyday spaces, multisensory inclusion for the disabled community and the consolidation of social effort. Terms like parish map, on-field tests are the necessary steps to create the immersive-participative itineraries of silent play.
The last reading was given by Stefania Zardini Lacedelli, founder of Dolom.it, an Italian virtual eco-museum. In this sense, her intervention is closer to the museum reality of SAMA and focuses on the need for virtualisation of museum services in the context of the participation - physical or digital - of its public. Through the Dolom.it project, Zardini lays the foundations for a new possible virtual eco-museum, based on:
Phyisical dematerialisation of museum's space
Virtualisation of heritage
Virtual community
Practices as polyvocal and co-curatorial narration
Processual transformation of the object
This is an extremely interesting contemporary posture for SAMA which, in the short term, has been experimenting with the use of possible new technologies (VR, AR, QR) with the aim of creating a 2.0 version of its collection and cultural activities in the hope of incorporating as many generations as possible into its daily mission dedicated to urban art.
Please find attached some interesting readings proposed by the panelists!
Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (2010)
Henry Jenkins, Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (2015)
Umberto Galimberti, Psiche e Techné. L'uomo nell'età della tecnica. (2002)
Event recordings are still available in English on the SMART page! Enjoy!