La Fornace del Museo. Il racconto site-specific del lavoro di un ceramista

Montelupo Fiorentino (FI) is a town historically linked to ceramics (Mandolesi and Vignozzi Paszkoski, 2019). Many architectural traces of the kilns have been lost, but some remain linked to pre-industrial production, such as the Cioni-Alderighi kiln. This one, leaning against the 14th-century walls, is part of the civic museum system. The object of conservative restoration, it has been at the centre of a debate for its functional destination, and is the first piece of a project for the recovery and regeneration of the historic centre. The paper presents the project to musealise the kiln, to be inaugurated in 2021. Following the methodology of research through design (Postiglione, 2012), the intervention answers three questions, crossing several disciplines: how to make tangible the artisan's knowledge and the atmosphere of a workplace, how to be able to speak to different audiences (in terms of age, nationality, intellectual capacity, cultural background), how to be sustainable in economic and management terms. The site-specific intervention experiments with a storytelling mode linked to the forms of video art. Sounds and images guide the visitor inside a workshop where the protagonists of the narration are the hands and the co-protagonists the original working tools (Focillon 2002; Sennett 2008). Hands that knead, hands that mould, hands that support, hands that scratch, hands that paint. The gesture is not explained with a didactic description but is seen and felt through video installations realised in collaboration with the Florentine artistic duo I Pastis. Each site-specific location consists of a video projector and a sound system. The overall intervention, which also includes the furniture and graphic design, was limited in cost (35K). The space is designed to be easy to manage and maintain, with the possibility of leaving it visitable even without a guard, thus not burdening the museum staff.