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Tag: curation


I recently published a short essay on the topic of recent monument wars that places my experience as part of the team that developed BZ ’18-’45 in the northern Italian city of Bolzano in dialogue with the conversations taking place in North and South America over monuments and historical memory. The essay begins: Where do monuments go to die? The question may appear incongruous given the urges that have motivated the making of monuments since
 
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- July 6, 2021

L’archivio animato – Lavori in corso // Work in Progress. An Animated Archive opened at the Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli in Bologna, Italy on November 23, 2019 and will run until May 17, 2020. I developed the concept for this somewhat anomalous exhibition and served as a consultant during the curatorial process; my long-time collaborator, Daniele Ledda (the founder of xycomm, Milan), did the design work. Rather than following conventional museological models, the exhibition
 
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- November 25, 2019

Long before curatorial practice became integral to my work, I devoured exhibition catalogs. As a scholar/curator, however, I have tended to chafe at some of the limitations of the standard notions of the catalog. Here’s a post on an experimental alternative to those conventional notions: the catalog for the Universo futurista / Futurist Universe exhibition (April 21, 2018 – May 19, 2019) at the Fondazione Sonia e Massimo Cirulli in Bologna–a catalog in the form
 
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- January 5, 2019

On April 9, 2016, BZ ’18-’45 was awarded a “special commendation” in the Council of Europe and European Museum Forum’s European Museum of the Year competition. The award specifies that it was granted for an “exhibition that reintegrates a controversial monument, which has long served as the focal point of battles over politics, culture, and regional identity. The project is a highly courageous and professional initiative to promote humanism, tolerance, and democracy.” For fully three years I
 
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- April 18, 2016

Last week, I had the honor of being one of the keynote speakers at an event, held at the Triennale di Milano on January 23, which marked the conclusion of an ambitious four-year EU research project on the theme of European Museums in the Age of Migrations. (That’s our age, in case you are wondering.) The project in question is described as follows on the project website: MeLa* European Museums in an age of migrations
 
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- January 26, 2015

After several iterations of the Library Test Kitchen design studio (including a detour to SXSW), the publication of The Library Beyond the Book (whose final chapter assumes the form of a screenplay), and a spring 2014 Humanities Studio dedicated to analyzing, mapping, documenting, and interpreting the Harvard Depository, metaLAB is pleased to announce the Boston premiere of its documentary/web documentary COLD STORAGE on February 6 at 3:30 pm in Piper Auditorium at Harvard’s Graduate School
 
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- January 6, 2015

An interview with Troy Conrad Therrien came out today in issue 2 of the ARPA Journal, a lively public forum for debate based at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The issue in question is largely framed around the question of search engines, past, present, and future; but broader questions of archiving and knowledge design arise in the course of the conversation, which dialogues indirectly with the lead piece in the issue:
 
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- November 19, 2014

BZ ’18-’45 was inaugurated on July 21, 2014 in the presence of the Italian minister of culture Dario Franceschini. Built around the crypt that lies beneath Marcello Piacentini’s 1926-1928 Monument to Victory, it consists in a center documenting the turbulent history of Bolzano and the Alto Adige region between the ends of World War I and World War II. BZ ’18-’45‘s subtitle is: one monument / one city / two dictatorships (see the gif below crafted by my collaborators at
 
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- July 23, 2014

Every now and then metaLAB holds a public event to showcase some work in progress, hack a device or two, resuscitate a multimedia piece or two from the vaults, and to start up some fresh conversations. In the past, such openLAB events have featured social games that make creative use of thermal receipt printers, Kinect-based gestural systems for remixing tracks on vintage vinyl recordings, an Arduino-armed book as an interface for navigating libraries. What’s an
 
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- April 30, 2014

This coming summer, metaLAB will be hosting a two-week workshop for art historians, scholars of visual culture, and museum professionals at all career stages on the topic of Beautiful Data: Telling Stories About Art with Open Collections. Supported by the Getty Foundation, the workshop will introduce participants to the concepts and skills necessary to make use of open collections to develop art-historical storytelling through data visualization, interactive media, enhanced curatorial description and exhibition practice, digital
 
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- January 17, 2014

Studio-based teaching has long represented the foundation stone of training in arts, design, and engineering fields, but far less so in the core humanities disciplines: this for an array of reasons that have privileged the theoretical and mental over the applied and “hands on.” There are some good reasons for this traditional bias but there is also a good deal of artifice, particularly so given the emergence of digitally inflected project-based forms of arts and
 
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- November 25, 2013

Today my colleagues Matthew Battles, Pablo Barria and I presented the Curarium project to this year’s class of Berkman Center fellows, as well as a lively group of Berkman friends and Berkmaniacs. Curarium is a platform designed to leverage the power of the crowd in order to annotate, curate, and augment works within and beyond their respective collections, with the aim of constructing sharable, media-rich stories and elaborate arguments about individual items as well as
 
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- September 24, 2013
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© 2013 Jeffrey Schnapp