Open! Progetti e strategie curatoriali museali per l’inclusività

Research confirms that museums are health allies (Fancourt and Finn, 2019). Under this assumption, all should be guaranteed physical, psychological, sensorial, and cultural access to museum sites. Being a place “open to the public, accessible and inclusive” and fostering “diversity and sustainability,” a museum project should consider encountering all deficits and the absence of cultural barriers. To become completely inclusive, the museum needs to work on differences, considering diversity a value and excluding the dichotomy of normalitydisability in favour of the coexistence of differences. As public places, Italian museums are usually hosted inside accessible buildings. On the contrary, the exhibit layout is not automatically accessible – due to the high of the objects and panels, font size, layout of captions, color of the rooms, integration of languages, and multimedia – and rarely embeds systems dedicated to the audiences’ deficits. Through the discussion of selected case studies and best practices, the paper illustrates the strategies that will lead the refurbishment project of the Ceramic Museum of Montelupo Fiorentino (FI). It considers the experiences of renowned museums, like the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, USA, little performing museums such as the Museum Benozzo Gozzoli in Castelfiorentino, Italy. The paper merges the curatorial and exhibit design perspective. The design translates the curatorial message into a space installation. Still, speaking about inclusiveness, accessibility, and fruition, one cannot exclude aspects like narrative, inclusive language, and specific use of off-site and online instruments. Everything should be calibrated and designed accordingly. Therefore, refurbishing the Ceramic Museum is the occasion to consider the new exhibit design as a laboratory for inclusiveness and the ground for implementing best practices in little museums.