There and Again

Mapping exhibition items and visitors’ memories

MartMuseo di arte moderna e

contemporanea di Trento e RoveretoItaly

www.mart.tn.it

“Photographing

means establishing a

special relationship

with the world”

Susan Sontag

Taking a photograph means

trying to make sense of the

world

Placing it on a map means

building and sharing knowledge

At the Mart Museum, in

Rovereto, Italy, we thought

these

themes were particularly

urgent for us

It was early 2013, and we

were planning an exhibition

about travel, memories, the

Grand Tour and “the gaze of

the tourist”.

“There and again. Souvenir de voyage” was an exhibition produced

by the Mart, Musem of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and

Rovereto between June and Semptember 2013.

Curated by the museum’s internal curatorial staff, it featured

videos, installations, paintings and sculptures by contemporary

artists, but also accounts of journeys that lead the visitors to real,

imagined and imaginary places.

At the Mart we have a web team:

a group of 9 colleagues from all

departments of the museum that

uses online resources

to provide access to quality

content to various communities

In particular, we reflected

on the idea that global

mass tourism inundates

us with images of places

with a “tourist slant”

We imagined the

development of a web

map that, by exploiting

the direct access to

information made possible

by social media, could

make it easier to build the

“special relationship with

the world” advocated by

Sontag.

We hired Pleens and

Accurat, two teams of

programmers, storytellers

and designers

We gave them just a few

hints

It was evident

early on they were

having fun

The map had to be beautiful

It had to be easy to populate with content

It had to be easy to populate with content

It had to be easy to populate with content

We uploaded a selection of images from the exhibition

And our web community contributed geo-tagged contents:

tweets, photos, blog posts

We selected the best, and displayed them on the map alongside the

works of art. Exhibition items and users' content were identified by

different colours

“Our tweets in the wonderful map of #thereandagain”

Contributors were expected to become involved

and hopefully advocates for the museum

We expected to improve

the exhibition experience

extending the debate

outside the museum spaces

But we also wanted to find

out what our current and

new audiences really

wanted to do with your

contents

Where am I?

All content was expected to be

geo-tagged. But we soon found

out that while our community

loved the project, most of

them did not want or could not

understand how to geo-tag

their contents

Therefore, extra work was

done in the background to

match entries with map points.

The museum web team and

the external developers

worked together to find a

community of influencers

who would start to populate

the map.

The travel bloggers

community

responded with enthusiasm.

They were our backup plan

in case the map took too

long to

fill up with tweets

And our own web team members contributed content with

their own voices and skills

But we really had no problems with quantity and quality

of users contents. 1526 tweets were launched by 430

persons, and read by 789.000 persons, with a potential

exposure of 7,1 million users

More important still, they were a great read

251 tweets were selected to appear on the map

26 entries were in fact blog posts, some of which of

remarkable quality

Our “Map of memories” has been active for two months

around september 2013.

After that we developed a plan to maintain the level of

engagement of this new community.

We delivered surprise present packages to around 300

twitter users who had proved to be ready to engage.

Offering exhibition catalogues as a reward to people who

have shown a high level of engagement is cost-effective,

because we know that these books will be studied,

shown, discussed and will grow coffee stains all over, as it

should be

And what about “finding out the things they really

wanted”

We read the tweets carefully and asked directly to some

of the users that we realized were being more

influential.

They all said the same thing:

they wanted to be able to take photos everywhere at the

museum, including inside the exhibitions.

Photos were not allowed at the museum.

So we revised our photo policy.

Now photos are allowed in the collections, and we are

working to grant permission whenever we can in the

temporary exhibitions

Photos byMafe de Baggis

Laura Celi

Duccio Dogheria

Carlotta Fanti

Fernando Guerra

Jacopo Salvi

The Mart Photographic Archive

Gianluca Vassallo

We can be found atwww.mart.tn.it

twitter.com/@mart_museum

Corso Bettini 43, Rovereto, Italy

Stats: Pleens/Tweetreach