Curating Archipelagos - Archiving the XXI century

What is a contemporary museum? Not concerning to an architectural design practice, but in relation to the criticism, the program and the context. The attempt of this research is to outline an investigation between a contemporary museum, the institution, and its autonomy, looking for a place of performances for every ritual of the contemporary culture.

The museum is no longer the place of a nostalgic re-appropriation of the past, it is not a place for manifestos: the contemporary museum is the place of the conversation and the conflict. If the knot of the modern museum was to become an institution, the practice of the contemporary museum is instead the democratization of the whole system towards a radical critique, looking for a place of performances for every ritual of the contemporary culture. This tendency implies an expansion of the meaning and the interface in relation to the content, the program, and its para-museum autonomy. The museum is a system of relations between narration and immersion, education and production, economy and sociality, tied in a passive and neutral form. This research moves from the museum as a form to its content, and the fundamental elements of this investigation become: the archipelago, the curatorial activity, and the archive. The concept of archipelago expresses the augment of the variation of the program within the museum. The curatorial activity is not limited just to the exhibition making, but it expands to every part of the body of the museum – publishing, education, conversation, and images. Finally the archive is the form, digital and physical, in which the museum processes the collection, the accumulation and the public access to its contents. These considerations on the archipelago, the field of curating and the archive imply different spatial, narrative and technical solutions with which the project tries to tackle the question of the contemporary museum. The process moves from three acts - deconstruct the building and the surfaces in autonomous and open parts, increasing, disperse and diffuse the program, de-institutionalizing the operating principle and the rigidity of movements and accesses. The process tries to involve both the growth and de-growth of a contemporary museums, it tries to propose a different relation between the straight line of the building, the institution, and the topology and density of the layout and the context.