Imagine, dream, resist: FOAM participants offer their visions for the future of Museion

“There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
Octavia Butler

Viewing museums as rarefied spaces dedicated to the conservation and exhibition of artworks has become outdated. Today, museums need to question their social impact, their relevance within local communities and the network of personal relationships in which they operate. How, then, can we plan their future? This question was explored by the ten participants in the FOAM Master’s program as part of the Infrastructures of Care module led by Sepake Angiama. Their projects, which use Museion as a pilot site, envision the museum as a space that transcends the physical confines of the institution by opening it up to participation, sustainability, activism, well-being, and interaction with the local community. These ideas have been published in a downloadable online fanzine (available as a PDF at the beginning of this article), and we present three examples of them in the following pages.

Unfolding the Museum
by Eleonora Todeschi

I spend a lot of time visiting museums, and I can’t help thinking that, even today, they often remain too impenetrable. I have seen a number of exhibitions where I haven’t been able to fully grasp the significance of the issues presented, which suggests that art museums are still regarded as niche spaces, aimed at a limited audience.

This situation recalls Gustave Flaubert, who, in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues, ironically defined the museum as a place of national glory, aristocratic audiences, instruction, and above all, reserved for a select few. Even if this was written almost two centuries ago, the image still resonates.

I believe that in the unstable and rapidly changing world we live in, art museums, and other institutions should try to evolve and transform at the same pace. To achieve this, the museum can no longer be just an exhibition space. Instead, it needs to become a center of interaction, critical thinking and participation. Today, many people share this need and vision, but what does it mean in concrete terms?

To try to answer this extremely complex question, I conducted 20 interviews on the role of the art museum with young adults aged 18–35 in the city of Bolzano. Their responses revealed a clear sense of detachment from cultural institutions. Many of the interviewees said they only visited museums rarely, and mostly while traveling. They also said they didn’t always understand what was on display. Three main social issues emerged: lack of comprehension, lack of participation and lack of social interaction.

The idea of addressing these issues through conviviality emerged from a dream I had during the Christmas holidays in which a long table had been set up in Museion Passage, and people were chatting and eating together there. The table was so long, it passed through the façade and continued outside the museum [1].

This is how the table became a central metaphor of the project. A place of equality, hospitality and exchange, that can dissolve hierarchies and foster dialogue.

Shared meals have historically created spaces for reflection and exchange. From the Roman convivium to Plato’s Symposium [2], for example, the banquet has always combined social ritual with intellectual exchange.

These reflections led to Unfolding the Museum, a public format that uses shared dinners as an informal device for conversation, exchange and raising collective awareness. Designed as a recurring event, it offers an alternative way to visit and experience the museum.

MuseIOT, The expanded urban museum
by Martina Salerno

My project stems from a number of observations about Museion and its relationship with the context it is located in.

Museion is an institution that is particularly attentive to contemporary issues. It offers an up-to-date program and attracts a specialized, international audience. At the same time, however, it has an institutional imprint that many museums have, and which, even in an innovative setting like this, can unintentionally create a certain detachment on the part of the local population, especially in a region with very strong ties to its traditions. It is not so much a question of accessibility or usability, but rather the ability of a diverse audience to feel part of the contemporary cultural conversation and actively contribute to its development.

I therefore see Museion’s future as that of an institution ready to free itself from the limits historically attributed to the museum as an authoritative, regulatory structure. The goal of my project, in fact, is to change its role from an institution proposing cultural content to that of an open space for discussion, where knowledge is shared, discussed, and built together with different communities. In this perspective, MuseIOT is a kind of extension of the museum, that expands into the city, offering opportunities for discussion and critical thinking, above all, addressing the communities that currently do not feel fully represented by cultural institutions.

The project therefore looks at the technologies that currently permeate our lives and seeks to identify which ones can be used as potential tools for mediation and interaction. In this way, a network of participatory installations based on IoT technologies (Internet of Things), can be set up across the local area to create a kind of cultural infrastructure offering new opportunities for civic participation directly in everyday life.
One example is a hypothetical IoT node in Walther Platz. This installation could be designed as a small pavilion where curious passers-by are invited to enter and offer their opinions or contributions on a topic proposed by the IoT devices inside. These devices would be specifically designed for the hub’s location. In this case, considering the square is often very busy, microphones or public “statement pillars” connected to Museion could be installed.
The resulting collection of opinions would provide the input that curators need to respond with new proposals, thereby creating both synergy and interaction between the museum and the people living in or passing through the city.
This is a museum model that touches numerous social spheres, and can be understood and experienced by anyone. Its network of interconnected hubs also covers all the various fields I explored during the FOAM Master’s program. These include cybernetics, digital media, and urban planning: all sectors that look at the current social condition for ways to reshape the future.

Radio Baccano
by Maria Costan Davara

Rather than wondering what the future of Museion might be, I began to ask myself what it means today for a cultural institution to take a stand. And to do that, not only through its program content, but also in its internal organization, or in what Keller Easterling would call its disposition. I wasn’t interested in imagining a museum that is more open, or how this temple could open its doors to the outside world, as that would only reproduce the binarism where only the center consecrates who can speak and who has the right of expression, even if these voices are located on the margins.

What does it really mean to speak from the margins?

The writer bell hooks defines the margin as a standpoint you can observe and question from. My project starts from there. It expands the field to its limits by including all the dense underground of realities where culture is already being produced and with it, different forms of political and social imagination. It takes the museum outside the temple by challenging and shattering its aura of untouchability, and setting it in motion on the margins. This is what sparked the idea of Radio Baccano, the project I developed while conducting research at Kanal—Architecture in Brussels.

This research uses the Kanal Centre Pompidou construction site as a case study for reshaping the relationship between an institution and urban space. A situation that resonates with Bolzano and Museion, which positions itself as a museum with social responsibility.

My proposal draws on the history of 1970s Italian free radio movements, not only as a laboratory of political imagination, but also for their role in making the medium of radio creative and subversive.

Radio Baccano is a house on wheels—inspired by the collective project of the bike-vacco, or bivouac on wheels, created in Belluno at the Ciclofficina Bambara—that circulates Brussels, drawing a map of alter-institutional spaces that animate the city’s cultural scene. The radio functions as an open platform that is transformed by each place that hosts it. The experiment is based on the question of what would happen if the margins spoke. At the same time, it reflects on the possibilities of redefining what is institutional and, therefore, what is a museum.

Right from the start, Brussels proved to be the ideal terrain for this type of operation, as it is crisscrossed by a surprising number of independent initiatives, created in response to or in proximity with major cultural institutions and a top-down urbanization process known as Bruxellization. Many elements here reminded me of Venice, the first place I investigated. Venice is a lagoon city and an international destination, whose Biennale circuit has, over time, generated a constellation of autonomous spaces that exist in explicit tension with the dominant system. These are the ecosystems I look at to find potential political, nomadic, collective and margin-based museum reconfigurations.

Perhaps, then, the future of Museion does not lie in being more open, or welcoming, in other words, being more appealing to more audiences, and pushing to reach ever new targets. Perhaps, to be contemporary, a museum must allow itself to be permeated by what is contemporary, instead of being institutionalized and periodized. Making a “baccano” or racket, means precisely this: creating the conditions for different voices to exist simultaneously, without being restricted to the univocal character of a single center.

Future of Art Museums – FOAM is a second-level university Master’s program conceived by Museion and unibz to train professionals in the fields of museology and museography, and equip them with tools for dealing creatively with the challenges of contemporary art museums and their ever-changing role in our continuously evolving society.

The program covers the most pressing issues that characterize the main aspects of contemporary art museums—exhibitions, installations, public programs, workshops, events, research projects, and collections—offering innovative perspectives and tools for interpreting the ways they are changing. The second edition of the Master’s program will begin in October 2027. Enrollment will open in the spring of the same year.