Il museo come processo di partecipazione. Laboratori d'arte per una cultura diffusa e inclusiva | The Museum as a participatory process. Art workshops for a widespread and inclusive culture

In the contemporary scenario, the museum institution has the possibility of becoming a strategic place of encounter, the protagonist of a cultural transformation capable of re-opening dialogue within communities, focusing attention on those territorial areas where the roads of cultural opportunities are often interrupted. The aim of this article is to highlight the discrepancies between the expectations and the concrete declinations of the museum institution, describing an experience conducted in the context of the Brescia suburbs. A participatory art process was activated by focusing on the peculiarities of specific community groups, and reconstructing with them the dimension of participation of a museum outside its walls, where interaction, education and promotion of the heritage took the form of the expression of the community involved. The chosen method was the art workshop, conceived as a process of creating a common narrative deriving from personal experience which – translated through the language of art – lost all singularity, becoming part of a collective narrative at the centre of which were the connecting nodes of the network existing between the participants and the place.