Artificazioni della performance: il caso del Museo Pasqualino

Abstract

This paper analyzes the process, dating back to the last 50 years, which has seen the work of art approaching everyday life, with critical perspectives increasingly focused on processuality and performance. Therefore, a notion such as that of artification – “process of processes”, according to Heinich and Shapiro – signals the paradox of the success of art at the time of its deconstruction. In this cultural climate, ethnographic museums reproduce, rework or draw on the languages of contemporary art, making them tools to overcome an essentialist notion of heritage but also to present multivocal interpretations and reflect on the processes that underlie “showing the difference”. The “Antonio Pasqualino” International Puppet Museum has followed this path by combining a properly museographic activity with field research and the staging of shows, first essentially in continuity with tradition, then also with research and innovation. A museum of performance, a museum-narration, a place of ideas and not of things, which goes beyond the simple collection and becomes a meta-story, an “open work”.