17 Mar 2016

Revealing the conflict / Representing the War, War, Curatorship and Museum Experience

IoDeposito - B#SIDE WAR Festival - Revealing the conflict / Representing the War, War, Curatorship and Museum Experience

At least 17 great museum curators and museum directors from all over the world will talk about curatorship and museum experiences in relation to the Twentieth Century's conflicts: this is the new project of IoDeposito Ong.

How can we tell a painful war past thanks to museum activities and experiences? How to conserve and transmit our common and shared memory preserving its authenticity? How to explore the 'B sides' of the Great War and the inconvenient truth of the Twentieth Century's conflicts throughout exhibitions, artistic and visual events, bringing to light all its forgotten contents? What strategies and good practices do enable us to involve the new generations and to pass down to them the memory of the 'Short Century'?
Revealing the conflict/Representing the war, organised by IoDeposito NGO, wants to respond to these and other many questions. Thanks to a series of three conferences, numerous museum curators and museum directors from all over the world will present their experiences in front of the necessity to represent wars and conflicts, and will look all together for good practices to share and learn. Within this frame of events, which have obtained the patronage of the Council of Europe, the theme of the visual representation of the conflicts as well as of the innovative curatorial and museum practices will be tackled.
Among the participants there will be some of the most famous museums worldwide, as they have put in practice amazing and innovative curatorial activities: the National World War 1st museum and Edward Jones Research Center (Kansas City/USA), the Australian War Memorial's Research Centre (Canberra/Australia), the Kobariskj Muzej (Kobarid/Slovenia), the In Flanders Fields Museum (Ieper/Belgio), the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Vienna/Austria & Ljubljana/Slovenia), the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (Hiroshima/Japan), the Serpentine Gallery (London/UK), The World Remembers (Canada), UX for Good, the Kigali Memorial Museum Center (Rwanda), Museo Emotivo della Grande Guerra (Giavera del Montello/Italy), the M9 Museum (Venice/Italy), the Museo della Marmolada Grande Guerra (Bolzano/Italy), the Museo della Battaglia di Vittorio Veneto (Vittorio Veneto/Italy), the photographer Jason Larkin with his Past Perfect Project (Egypt, Israel & Great Britain), the Memorial De Verdun (Verdun/France).
'We have organised this round of conferences bearing reference to the idea that visual art, images and expositions are a delicate as well as a privileged means to transmit memory' – Chiara Isadora Artico, president of the association, says. 'This is the reason why, within the cultural and artistic festival B#SIDE WAR, we have decided to have these roundtables, which are useful and important to reflect on the museum visual experiences and to elaborate our common past. To do so, we have involved the network of our several international and national partners. We are very glad for the result we have got by putting into practice our method of visual research, and we hope our conferences will be useful even for the younger ones. We believe that promoting the transmission of memory is an effective way of taking care of the new generations and, when this is done on an international scale, it let us reflect on our contemporary common identity. Indeed, our association was founded six years ago for this very reason: to care about and to deal with the young people's cultural and identity wellbeing'.

For the whole programme of the round of conferences: www.iodeposito.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/2016bside_conferences_brochure_en.pdf

For the whole programme of the B#SIDE WAR Festival: www.iodeposito.org/en/projects/bside-war-vol-ii/program/