Luca Bochicchio from Savona

We are dealing with a new time and space. What are you discovering or rediscovering about yourself?
Personally it was (I am speaking in the past tense because today I am writing in a moment of rediscovered freedom of movement, despite the inconveniences and limitations that we know) a complicated experience. Like many others, I experienced a swing of conflicting moods. I believe that if the forced isolation had lasted less than the actual two months we experienced, probably my resistances, the result of years of intense life, at a happy but also frenetic pace, they would not have folded. Instead, this is exactly what happened, in the continuing isolation, I regained possession of gray areas that I had willingly and guiltily hidden deep inside myself. I think in that seemingly endless series of days that are all the same, I have elaborated feelings and situations that emerged in forced isolation. It is too early to judge the outcome of this process, but I am grateful to have lived it.

What you're missing? Your personal experience of "absence" and "lack".
I lack the freedom of movement, very very much, and the freedom to meet.

Museums and galleries have reacted to the moment with digitalization and virtuality. What are your "strategies" for establishing new relationships?
Those museums that could already count on a solid and well-structured communication system of their own have certainly been able to implement the dissemination of online content and interaction with their audiences, getting a outreach more effective. The museum I run, the MuDA Diffused Museum of Albissola Marina, does not possess yet (we were working on it just when the lockout went off) self-sufficient communication, nevertheless we felt we had to move towards the public through the only channels we had available: i social network. We therefore took steps to make videos (from short documentary to virtual tour, under video interview) that we shared on the Youtube channel of Young and on Other exhibitions that I would have dealt with for the Basilica of San Celso in Milan will open in the fall (Instagram and Facebook, where we kept the interaction active from the Casa Museo Jorn canal). At the network level, The activation of direct and digital invasions connected to the great realm of Italian cities and museums worked well for us; events such as Hello ceramic they have really kept alive the relationship between the communities scattered throughout Italy. Beyond this, we used the time of the block to work on the structural criticalities of our museum and to rethink the relationship with our audiences. (that the closure of the spaces has dramatically compromised, being based on a regular turnout and attendance). Also, we worked with other museums in the area to share information and best practices to face the reopening.

How do you imagine the world, when everything will start again?
I imagine that in the jerseys of our daily race to the consumption of the Earth and resources (apparently unstoppable even in the face of pandemics like this one), positive micro-processes will emerge, fruit of the maturation of new awareness, but this normally happens in history and is the greatness of the human being, when it is expressed collectively through solidarity and care. Other positive effects could reverberate in the civil attention to fundamental issues (and for decades harassed in Italy), such as public health and education (even if at the moment we are seeing the opposite, I think of the lack of solutions and answers on schools and universities). The culture of museums and historic centers, for years subjected to mass tourism, it will find itself in need of rethinking (Luckily). Today we hear about local tourism, of eco-sustainability, and we know how these and other good practices have been promoted, encouraged and invoked by various sectors of civil society since the beginning of globalization. I therefore believe that people with governance responsibilities should have the courage to open up to these communities and share bottom-up work practices. Many will treasure what they learned during the block and try to fix something in their life. For the rest, I believe that we will see extremes of social conflict. Then I imagine a world where Covid-19 will be the reminder of the first of many other global crises. It will be necessary to be strong and to be vigilant.

We are realizing that we can live with less mobility?
It often happens in history that phases of deep crisis require us to explore not so much "new" ways of living together and communicating, but rather exhaustive connection practices that finally exploit the 100% the potential of existing but underestimated means before the crisis. I think about tools well known for some time, but never used like today: telematic meetings, live streaming, the virtuous combination of different social and sharing platforms. How we will justify all small and large movements from tomorrow (with all that they entail in terms of pollution, use of personal and collective resources, stress and frenzy, overlaps and incompatibilities, difficulty in physically reaching certain places) which we have actually experienced can be easily replaced by remote encounters? For some activities, including, indeed, starting with playful ones and certain professions, traveling is essential, and we will have to fight (it is not rhetoric, be careful not to take it for granted) for the right to freedom of movement in the times and places we decide; but this crisis partially removes the veil: we have been for gods years sapiens who used certain tools with the da mentality erectus. Mind you: for a large part of society those movements that I have previously classified as expensive are essential to fuel the economic chain, but this is precisely where the system error lies. This crisis has forced an acceleration of the collective process of adaptation to digital tools (that already existed, and which are now being refined, improve, under the pressure of a renewed and enlarged demand), demonstrating how much of our habits are based on conventions created and induced by the capitalist and consumerist system. For families and workers who had never paid too much attention to it, today it seems more convenient to have a good data connection network than a TV subscription, it is banal but let us remember that epochal changes never occur following the calendar of decades and centuries, and as has happened in the past it is possible that in the 2020 you really start the 21st century.

Luca Bochicchio, PhD, he is scientific director of the MuDA Museo Diffuso Albisola and of Casa Museo Jorn. He is a professor of Communication of Cultural Heritage at the University of Genoa and the author of numerous essays in magazines and catalogs. In 2016 he published the monograph for Mimesis Sculpture and memory: Leoncillo, the Fallen and the Survivors. He has curated or co-curated exhibitions on Luigi Pericle (2019); Salvatore Arancio (2019); Lucio fontana (2018); Anders H. Ruhwald (2018); Enrico Baj (2015; 2017) and Asger Jorn (2014), and collaborated with Mamco (Geneva), Cobra Museum (Amsterdam), Hauser&Wirth (New York), Gmurzynska (Zurich), MiC (Faenza) and Officine Saffi (Milan). He was recently a visiting researcher at the Henry Moore Institute (Leeds) e alla Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University).