2023-10-20 17:00:47
by IDA BOZZI
A series of exhibition itineraries spread across the university campus will be inaugurated on Monday 23 October at the university: the first installation by Ugo Nespolo. An open-air laboratory, explains the rector Gianni Canova
Communication is one of the fundamental elements of human society, from the times when it relied on primitive means, such as drums or smoke signals, up to the digital age. Tam Tam, the communication museum that will transform the spaces and campus of the Milanese university into an open and widespread exhibition itinerary, is born at Iulm: the new initiative will be inaugurated on Monday 23rd together with the first installation, the Theater of Media Arts, designed by Ugo Nespolo which will be located in the atrium of the university and which illustrates the various stages of human communication. The initials of the name of Nespolo’s work (Tam) contribute to giving the museum its name, which also resonates with the idea of the tam tam, the drum which was among the first means of distance communication.
On this occasion, Monday 23rd, in the Iulm Auditorium (5.30 pm), the Biella artist will also be awarded an honorary master’s degree in Management of Artistic and Cultural Resources, in the presence of the authorities and the rector of Iulm Gianni Canova. Among the heretical animators of Arte Povera – we read in the reasons for the award -, among the most original protagonists of Italian Pop Art, but also a filmmaker and theorist, Ugo Nespolo is among the last heirs of what has been defined as “mass avant-garde”.
This will be followed by the inauguration at 6.15 pm, when the installation will be discovered in the atrium in which the artist has reinterpreted, with his style between pop and futurism, the most representative icons of communication, such as newspaper newspapers. newspapers, newsboys’ megaphones, cinema and advertising posters, television and radio sets, the typewriter, the internet snail, and much more, which can also be seen in the catalog published by Electa.
The Tam Tam museum will be, explains the rector Canova to the Corriere, an open-air laboratory, a work in progress which will open with Nespolo’s installation but will continue with many other interventions: This is the first station of a widespread museum of communication which will to occupy the entire university campus. Therefore, it is not a closed room, but a museum open to students and the whole city, which tells the story of the disciplines that are taught in this university, that is, communication expressed in all possible nuances. In Italy there are museums of everything and about everything, but there wasn’t and isn’t a museum that talks about communication, and so we said to ourselves: let’s try to do it, let’s try to start underlining the importance of dedicating attention, spaces and exhibition itineraries on the theme of communication.
One of the subsequent stages will be the opening in the museum of a path in the Tower of the Iulm 6 building: It will be a “time line” – continues the rector -, which will go up all nine floors of the tower recalling the fundamental stages of the history of the communication: we start from the first tranche, which we will inaugurate in a few months, dedicated to communication from the Tower of Babel to Gutenberg and the invention of the press. This “time line” will propose a very broad meaning of communication: there will be the section dedicated to the pulpit and the square, as communication channels typical of the Middle Ages; or the section dedicated to racing pigeons and smoke signals; or the one dedicated to the postal service that was born in ancient Rome, and so on. It will be curated by Sergio Pappalettera and Studio Prodesign, it will be very technological and very interactive. And like the whole museum, open to the city. I would like to underline that the entire museum initiative was created with an investment from the University and with private sponsors, therefore not with public money.
Even the walls of the university, internal and external, will become part of the exhibition itinerary, continues Canova: There will be the wall of the word, which will be filled with phrases by famous authors who remind us of the importance of the word in communication, but we will also have the wall of gestural languages, the wall of signs, the wall of posters, the wall of book covers. And there will be a cinema wall, in which we will make public a collection of thousands of posters and film posters that come from the De Amicis cinema in Milan, donated to the university by the heirs of the owners of De Amicis and with materials that date back as far as 40 or 50 years ago.
Part of the project will be dedicated to the most contemporary digital realities, the virtual, augmented reality and the metaverse, with the reconstruction, thanks to virtual reality, of different communicative habitats. For example, for the Seventies: you will enter an environment and, through digital and artificial intelligence, you will find yourself in the communication habitat of the Seventies, with the tazebao, the mimeograph machine, Radio Alice. Or, for the Middle Ages: you will find yourself among the scribes, the monasteries, the carrier pigeons.
The educational function of the museum is also underlined by the project to organize, on a periodic basis, meetings, in-depth moments and guided tours for the public, free and open to all. Furthermore, in a university dedicated to the ways and forms of communication, the participation of students in the construction of the museum will obviously be important and conspicuous.
Some student research groups have already started working on the creation of video documents that will be part of the exhibition itineraries. Placed in the “time lines” – concludes the rector – we will have “montage videos” made by the students, who will talk about the various media, the telephone, the telegraph, television, radio, cinema, the newspaper, the book, the gesture language. With the ambition, by working on archive repertoires and images, to be able to condense not so much the history of a single medium, for example television, but the various ways, the different forms and functions with which it has been used over time .
October 20, 2023 (modified October 20, 2023 | 4:55 pm)
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
#museoCorriere.it #project #starts #Iulm