Cultural and creative sectors have a fundamental impact on the economy and the employment rate of a country. They stimulate and encourage innovations in the economic sphere by generating a positive social impact within various contexts such as wellness and health, instruction, inclusion, urban regeneration, etc.
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The policies supporting businesses and workers that have been adopted during the Pandemic period were not adequate to non-traditional business models nor to the related work characterizing these models. Having only had short-term support both from the public and the private sector, cultural insititutions had to rethink their strategies so that all the policies involved for the recovery and relaunch of local economies could have also been an incentive for the social impact generated by culture. Moreover, due to the fact that cultural incubators – museums, theatres, concert halls, precious buildings and palaces – are still close and will probably reopen under certain restrictions, they had to enanche the sense of community and remind to their audience that they will be again phisical meeting points and places for gatherings. To do so, they proved that, even under these current circumstances, they can represent places for social rebuilding. They can still offers means to be part of an audience, a need that pushes people to create a precious community, now more than ever.
This mood is pushing most of the cultural places to give to their audience a sense of community, a feeling of belonging to a special group that share the same interests and topics. Cultural institutions are working to create special online projects, with online contents that can be widely available and enjoyable. There are some realities that really improved their digital spaces and that are offering well thought and well-developed novelties. During a study for a research made by Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan, some venues were taken under case studies such as OGR Torino, Santarcangelo Festival, Tate Galleries, MoMa and Uffizi Gallery. These realities, all very different one from the other, share the same purpose to maintain a resilience attitude towards culture while providing a high-quality entertainment, thanks to the development of new digital projects and contents for different kinds of audience.
Tate, for instance, improved its beautiful online laboratories and expanded the pills section related to their permanent collection. Clips, animation, quiz, storytelling represent vivid and simply actions to keep their public aware on what is happening inside the museum, even if it is not physically open to the public.
The historical performance and theatrical reality of Santarcangelo Festival, that recently changed its name to Santarcangelo Festival 2050 (as a signal to look to the future, but also to underline their 50thanniversary), developed an online project made by a very well-articulated catalogue with important contents, essays and explanations wrote with an incisive impact graphic. Santarcaneglo Festival in Romagna, Italy, is deeply rooted into its territory: it is a summer festival that combines and connect artists, performer, intellectuals, designers, musicians, from all over the world, for few days inside a small antique town. As the dialogue among people and towards the territory is the main focus of this event, and being it subjected to restriction this year, they really had to create something important as documentation.
Regarding museums, MoMa improved its website – that already had an extraordinarily huge and complete archive open to everybody – providing access to all its contents organized as theme exhibitions.
In Italy, Uffizi Gallery, one of the most International cultural realities of the country, developed very interesting projects to share their great contents and works of art. An idea such as Fabbriche di Storie, for instance, is simple but very effective as it is an enjoyable way to learn about some of the masterpieces collected inside the museum. “Twelve Uffizi’s masterpieces narrated in audio-tracks offer the public an unusual vision of the works, along with the museum as an inexhaustible “workshop” of stories”, Mantegna, Bellini, Botticelli that we can “see” by listening.
These are just few of the examples of how many possibilities we have to use and learn and enjoy culture and a community, so going digital, for now, will help us to create new ideas and resist until we will go inside a museum or a theatre again in person, with a better attitude.
Cover image: Santarcangelo2050, Futuro Fantastico.
Wrtitten by Rossella Farinotti
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