Rewrite
The rewriting of the epistemic apparatuses of a contemporary ethno-anthropological museum starts from understanding its own histories of study, cataloging, archiving, display and sharing of knowledge, and examining how the current methods can be updated to further the understanding of its collections.
The action of rewriting the institution’s graphic identity, teaching aids and editorial tools is a key step in initiating, first and foremost, a process of linguistic analysis aimed at revising terminologies and the relative categories of thought, such as expressed in the term “Oriental” or the pairing of “prehistory” with “ethnography”.
The aim in rewriting the biographies of the individual artefacts and objects, with particular attention to their provenance and interpretations, together with reconstructing the origins of the various collection nuclei and disciplines of the various museums merged into the Museum of Civilizations, is ultimately to re-contextualize the objects. The writing of the biographies relates in turn to the urgent contexts of the contemporary world, with which the objects must be brought back into contact, among others the processes of decolonization of institutional infrastructures, the phenomena of the climate crisis and of global anthropization. The steps involved include the adoption of multi-species perspectives, and the recognition of inequalities in access to material and immaterial resources.
To this end, the museum has conceived an ongoing project called Printing Proofs, which reinterprets the processes and criteria underlying all expressions of institutional graphics. Instead of envisaging a static and univocal logo and graphics, Printing Proofs pursues a dynamic and experimental path, playing precisely on the metaphor of “proofs” to incorporate the provisional nature of cognitive exploration, revision and change. From this emerges an identity capable of adapting graphically through time, re-specifying or even contradicting itself, as the projects of the Museum of Civilizations proceed. The basic identity, designed by the NERO collective of Rome, explores a minimal dimension of the visual layout, with essential typographic solutions that favor the proliferation of “spaces” in its different declinations – whether in the logo, the exhibit infographics, the website or paper-based publications. In line with this thinking, Printing Proofs envisages the participation of a plurality of co-authors, particularly in developing the rearrangements of displays, in which museum’s scientific departments and the different communities can now jointly engage in considering the relative iconographic and visual elements. Starting from a conception of the Museum of Civilizations identity as a “ground zero”, in which each element is a surface ready to accommodate the signs of an articulated network of knowledge in formation, according to an organic principle of “hospitality,” the institution overcomes the concept of verticality typical to almost all visual identities. Through collaboration, visual communication is itself redesigned, being reconfigured as a continuous and imaginative “proof”. Moreover, the captions, posters and infographics contributing to the museum’s spaces, from “methodological entrances” to ticket counters to exhibition halls, will now be made from every-day, low-cost and sustainable materials. All of these suggestions become part of the visual communication system, and define its character.
In synergy with the rethinking of museum methodologies, the gradual rearrangement of collections and the concomitant rewriting of their interpretive apparatuses can help transform the museum from a reassuring custodian of past civilizations into a critical agent of civilizations, present and to come: into a worksite open to different audiences, recalibrating its instruments and retargeting its programming, day by day.