Engaging visual culture: MIAC, The Italian Museum of Moving Images or Museo Italiano dell’Audiovisivo e del Cinema

Since its Italian and English presentations referred to “moving images” or “audiovisivo and cinema”, the new museum of MIAC (2020) shows one of the tensions that have characterised all the institutions devoted to the transmission of film or cinematographic culture from the half of the last century. Firstly, there is the inevitable (but not always adopted) storytelling of audiovisual or cinema traditions as items of a combined history of communicative media. In fact, for example, many areas of the museum present devices dedicated also to the radio. Indeed, perhaps for the first time in Italy, it has consequently collocated them into the major panorama of the visual culture, animated from various forms not only of ‘moving images’ but also through different technologies and socio-cultural boundaries. Most importantly, these oscillations reveal a tendency towards their re-exhibition through the same images as archival and museological dispositives themselves. For these reasons, the paper aims to present and discuss, using cine-museological studies, the concept behind the institution of MIAC, realized by the MIBACT (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali) e l’Istituto Luce-Cinecittà with many Italian researchers, audio-visual institutions, and film archives. The analysis will follow its translation into the museographic developments, generally characterized by the combination of chronological and thematic storylines referred parallel to histories, production-reception systems, and imaginaries of these media. This study about MIAC could disclose comparatively new possibilities, specificities, and critical limits linked to the Italian and international film museums. The research, in particular, tries to enlighten its reuse of audio-visual products to problematize their role configuring (Italian) imaginary; the contribution given by the artistic work of None Collective focused into the building of “narrative” and “transmedial” installations; and, the intermedial strategy of the museum notably exemplified by the building of a chronological timeline with animated graphics, images, lights, and so on. So, applying recent studies about the relationships between medial spaces and morphological constructions, it could be useful understand how the cine-museums can work with aesthetic and creative approaches on the ‘transmission’ of historical and topological connections between representations, technologies, audiences, and contexts.