Orme di pietra nel paesaggio: un museo per riannodare il rapporto tra una comunità e il suo territorio

Abstract

The topic of this article is a museum called MATER (MOTHER in Latin), created in the small village of Mamoiada in central Sardinia. As everywhere in the backbone of the Italian peninsula, in this village the disappearance of farming and animal-rearing society has led to a process of detachment between community and territories. The museum was built with the aim to offer, by re-interpreting some of the stony footprints deposited in the landscape, some instruments that might help restoring this relationship. It does so by producing new forms of narration tending to bring to the surface a new, ‘poetic’, though collective at the same time, vision of this particular territorial asset. By combining expert and context knowledge and through an interactive involvement of the community, the museum was conceived as an interactive, relational and convivial work-in-progress in which, thanks to the use of an anachronistic perspective, of art languages and multimedia devices, it is possible to re-connect the different temporalities existing in the territory and to provide instruments pointed at recreating a perception of this as an ‘intelligent environment’, interweaving objects of affection, visions, concepts and symbols left to us by the previous generations and which we must learn again to cherish.