Symposium
May 17th, 2014
10 a.m. – 1 p.m. // 2 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Today photography is an art in transformation. The idea of the museum has been in rapid flux recently: the development of techonology ad the death of traditional arts, the continuous increase of a diversified public have suggested to many that we abandon the idea of the museum as a repository of traditional cultural models, and think of it as an open place of cultural experience to share with the public.
The Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea (the Museum of Contemporary Photography) possesses a collection of 2 million images as well as a large library of 20 thousand volumes. Since 2004, the year of its inauguration, in addition to cataloguing, preserving and promoting the culture of photography, the museum has developed different kinds of activities, growing in and with the contemporary changes in art and communication.
As a museum of the third millennium, since its founding it has considered the transformation of both the idea of photography and the idea of the museum. That is the reason why we propose to “celebrate” its tenth birthday with a symposium discussing its identity. We wish to invite directors, curators, and art historians to a symposium to consider topics of current interest for the future of a museum of photograhy.
Photography has been fully accepted among the arts. Is a museum exclusively dedicated to photography still important and interesting?
Is it more interesting to propose a contemporary art center that includes photography, an art among the arts?
Should we think of a museum that promotes all the technological arts, the new media, starting from photography, the mother of all the technological arts?
Today we are on the threshold of a major change in the form of virtual images and loss of the physical image. The public of our immediate future will be the “digital natives”. What kind of museum should we imagine?
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