2nd 'EuroVision' Conference
Rome, Italy | Università Roma Tre
The second general meeting of the EU project “EuroVision. Museums Exhibiting Europe” (EMEE) will take place in Rome from 12 to 15 November 2013. The event is aimed at bringing the involved partners together after the first year of the project, in order to review the achieved results and plan the next steps.
With innovative and interdisciplinary concepts based on didactics of history, the museum project “EuroVision. Museums exhibiting Europe” (EMEE) – funded by the EU Culture Programme with 2 million euros – is intended to develop multi-perspective approaches for the Europeanisation of national and regional museums. Thereby, also especially those people who usually do not go to museums shall be convinced. New ways of representation, scenography and possibilities to participate help the visitors to discover transnational and European perspectives. At the same time, the project develops creative concepts for the “audience-development” and tries to assign a new role to the museum as a “social arena” within an increasingly multicultural society.
The second general meeting in Rome will gather all project partners in order to draw an interim conclusion and to provide the foundations for the further steps of the project. Emma Nardi hosts the meeting, she holds the Chair of Museum Studies at the Università di Roma Tre. Moreover, Emma Nardi is the chairwomen of the “Committee for Education and Cultural Action (CECA)” of the International Council of Museums (ICOM).
The focus will be the “mapping process”, which has already been completed. In that step, the project partners selected and documented best-practice examples of innovative exhibition concepts and education approaches, in which the change of perspective from regional interpretations to trans-regional and European views became visible. The participants also analysed changes of perspective regarding the roles of visitors and curators – especially in order to explore possibilities of a more active participation of museum visitors.
The results of the “mapping process” will be reviewed in Rome with the further steps of the project in mind. The next step is the planning phase: programmes for the “audience development” will be developed in order to get non-visitors interested in museums. Another task is to prepare five manuals, on the basis of practical examples of the “mapping process”, which shall support museums to actively include elements of “museums development” and Europeanisation in their exhibitions as well as their education programmes. This step as well already is in progress and shall be discussed in more detail during the conference.
Moreover, project partners themselves will be concerned with practising changes of perspective towards museum objects. A trip to the Baths of Diocletian is planned which will take place as a public event. Thereby, the exciting approach of multi-perspective reflection is presented to the public.
The project’s first year out of four is almost over. Susanne Popp, professor at the Chair of Didactics of History in Augsburg and coordinator of the EMEE project seems satisfied with the status of the project before the conference in Rome: “The project has started successfully and the ‘mapping process’ has compiled exciting examples of innovative international museum practice. Now I am looking forward to the direct exchange in Rome in order to reflect upon the shared process and to specify the further steps. After four years duration of the project we will be able to provide a lot of know-how in order to enable a multi-perspective and trans-regional/European view on objects and topics in national and regional museums.”
The EMEE project is coordinated by the Chair of History Didactics of the University of Augsburg. Project partners are the National Archaeology Museum in Lisbon (Portugal), the Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana (Slovenia), the National Historical Museum in Sofia (Bulgaria), the Atelier Brückner GmbH in Stuttgart (Germany), the art association monochrome in Vienna (Austria), the Roma Tre University in Rome (Italy) and the University Paris-Est Créteil – ESPE in Paris (France). Apart from the project partners, further museums and partners loosely associated with the project will be present at the meeting.