Bolzanism Museum. The museum of social housing buildings and of the people that inhabits them.
Bolzanism Museum (BZM) is Italy’s first open-air museum dedicated to narrating public housing buildings and the stories of the people that inhabit them.
Through theatrical urban explorations, workshops and events, the BZM invites inhabitants, visitors and tourists to discover Bolzano’s western suburbs with a promise: you will never look at Bozen West with the same eyes again.
National
Italy
Municipality of Bolzano
Autonomous Province of Bozen/Bolzano
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-10-15
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Cooperativa 19 Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Valentina Last name of representative: Cramerotti Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Project Manager Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: via Bari 36/c Town: Bolzano Postal code: 39100 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 349 072 5830 E-mail:valentina.cramerotti@cooperativa19.it Website:https://www.cooperativa19.it/it/
Bolzanism Museum (BZM) is Italy’s first museum dedicated to narrating public housing buildings and the stories of the people that inhabit them.
Through theatrical urban explorations (Bolzanism Walks), workshops (Bolzanism Lab) and events, from June to October the BZM invites inhabitants, visitors and tourists to discover Bolzano’s western suburbs with a promise: you will never look at Bozen West with the same eyes again.
Bolzano and its periphery can be read as a large laboratory in which different modes of urban and social development were experimented throughout the 20th century as the city was growing. A fundamental role in this process fell on public housing buildings, which represented the basic unit in the construction of the peripheral neighbourhoods Don Bosco and Europa Novacella.
Bolzanism was born as an urban concept that attempts to involve and activate the inhabitants of Don Bosco and Europa Novacella in the creation of a new identity and recognisability of the public housing buildings in which they live.
By becoming a temporary open-air museum, BZM fosters a process of redefinition and reappropriation of the identity, history and aesthetics of the periphery. It therefore does not limit itself to cataloguing data, stories and urban-architectural elements but creates a new narrative, a permanent observatory on Bolzano’s periphery and on public housing, a platform where citizens and visitors can find themselves and rediscover the identity of the city and of a community.
Public & social housing
Identity
Urban storytelling
Community
Public Engagement
The BZM addresses the theme of sustainability from its core: the Bolzanism Walk is a urban itinerary halfway between a theatrical piece, a narrated story and a performance. By exploring Bolzano on foot we are able to bring people through the courtyards of the public housing architectures of the Don Bosco and Europa Novacella districts with the aim of discovering the urban and social development of Bolzano’s periphery. Both our urban explorations and our workshops promote the idea of a city that can be explored and lived through walking on a daily basis.
Bolzanism also fosters a different kind of tourism: our aim is to get people to look at their own cities in a different way and to find new means of exploring the territory rather than always travelling to newer and farer destinations. We also encourage a slow tourism that takes time to understand the complexity and the spirit of a place rather than “consuming” the city by quickly visiting only city-centres and famous landmarks.
Moreover, Bolzanism is committed to reducing its environmental impacts: the Bolzanism Walks require nothing but two storytellers and a few paper materials (to offer more information post-visit). We suggest reaching the meeting point by bus/foot/bike. The tickets are sold online to prevent both the printing of paper and the need to move toward a ticket shop. Our communication is mainly digital. Given the temporary nature of our initiative, our Infopoint has been self-built with wood and materials provided locally.
Finally, through its activities Bolzanism promotes the aknowledgement of the city and its development as a way of better understanding how the city works and foster the development of citizens that are more aware about the city of the past and the present in order to make informed decisions about the city of tomorrow.
The very idea behind BZM is to narrate and valorize the history of Bozen’s peripheric areas and to change the perspective about neighbourhoods and buildings that are often considered ugly, degraded, dangerous both by Bozen’s citizens and outsiders.
During the XX Century, the development of Bozen’s periphery has been a laboratory for many architects who experimented new ways of designing collective living (Aymonino, Piacentini, Darbourne & Darke) but the inhabitants of these public housing buildings are often unaware of the history of their homes. BZM was born in the first place to tell this story to the buildings’ residents and to involve them in the re-discovery of their districts and the building where they were living, in order to deconstruct their experience and give them other tools to understand the places they are living in.
The project grew to reach people living in other parts of Bozen and even tourists to develop a narration of Bozen that is not only related to the pretty and historic city-center and its landmarks but of a city where you can find history, beauty and culture even in the peripheral neighbourhoods. Through our activities we also want to promote the idea that cultural activities can be found in other parts of the city. For this reason, during its first three years BZM has collaborated with plenty of cultural organisations on a local and national level in order to create a discourse about culture, periphery and public housing that could take place right in the suburbs and create exchange with other places and practices.
Communicating the contents and the identity of BZM has forced us to reflect on the way of narrating things: the choice of an ironic and direct 'tone-of-voice' or the desire to enhance its recognisability are an integral part of the narrative. BZM's logo is based on the use of a typeface that had glyphs and variants taken from as many alphabets as possible visually suggesting the complexity of Bolzano’s periphery.
BZM tackles the theme of inclusion from different point of views:
Content Accessibility
Through the use of theater and storytelling as a way to convey the history of Bolzano, the BZM makes the content comprehensible to a wide audience: the public doesn’t need to be expert of architecture, history or urbanism in order to be able to participate and to learn from a Bolzanism Walk.
By installing our Infopoint in the heart of Europa Novacella district, we wanted to “mediate” the presence of the museum in the neighbourhoods that we cross with our Walks: people can stop by and ask information about us, making the BZM and our activities understandable and accessible for everyone.
Language accessibility
In the context of Alto Adige Sudtirol (a region where both Italian and German are primary languages) inclusion and accessibility means also language accessibility: through the years we made sure that all the BZM walks were available both in Italian and in German language. Moreover, in the past two years we worked toward developing the content of our Walks to broaden the accessibility toward other languages: by involving two second-generation students (Jon and Rahma) we were able to implement one BZM walk in Albanian and one in Arabic.
Mobility accessibility
BZM Walks are based on the idea of walking as a way of exploring the city but when designing the routes we made sure that the street and passages we pass through would be fit to be accessible with strollers, wheelchairs and other personal mobility aids.
Affordability
BZM has always tried to finance its activities through public funding and sponsors in order to keep a moderate ticket (with reductions for childrens) and has also created discounts for inhabitants by distributing coupons in Don Bosco and Europa Novacella districts.
Since the very beginning of Bolzanism in 2017 the aim has been to involve the inhabitants of Bozen West’s neighbourhoods in the process of re-signification of the places where they live. In the beginning - as we were ourselves studying and researching the districts of Don Bosco and Europa Novacella and the public housing buildings that have been built there - we would travel from courtyard to courtyard with a temporary exhibition and we would engage the residents by telling them the story related to their housing complexes. Through these chats it became clear that there was something as important as the buildings and the architects that needed to be narrated: the human heritage of the residents themselves.
As Bolzanism developed towards becoming an open-air museum, the stories and the experiences of the residents became an integral part of our research, which we collected through meeting, dialogues and interviews. By sharing their personal history and their p.o.v, BZM engages the residents in being part of the process of creating the narration of their neighbourhood.
The inhabitants not only have a key role in the development of BZM’s narration but are also the primary target of our activities. In the first three years of BZM 87,2% of the visitors who are also residents affirms to have learned new things about their neighbourhood and 76,5% affirms that their perspective has changed in a positive way.
Creating the BZM has been an open process that has involved also Bolzano’s new
generations and those young people who are able to redefine places and stories in an engaging way. Firstly we asked the students of Unibz a question “Can you build a museum in a week?”: 8 students joined us in a workshop dedicated to designing and self-building our Infopoint. Secondly we involved a group of young actors and storytellers to become the “narrators” of the BZM: through the “Storytraveler Call” we cultivated a group of 10 storytellers to conduct the Bolzanism Walks.
The Youth Policies office of the Province of Bolzano has been the primary supporter of Bolzanism from the very beginning, both through funding and general support in the implementation of the idea. Along the way we’ve also received support from the Office for bilingualism and foreign languages in the development of Walks in German, Albanian, Arabic.
IPES-Wobi (the local institute for public housing) has also been involved since 2017: not only they sponsor our initiative but they’ve collaborated in the process of involving the residents by giving us contacts and allowing us to use the spaces of the buildings. Other sponsors are Confesercenti Alto-Adige and the Tourist board of Bolzano.
BZM has also been patronized by the Municipality of Bolzano and the University of Bolzano, which was also involved in the design of the self-build workshop during which we created our Infopoint and in the development of the public program “Bolzanism Atlas”.
In 2020 and 2021 we developed a few projects together with Museion, Bolzano’s contemporary art museum. In 2020 we worked with them in developing Cristian Chironi’s performance Bolzano Drive and the creative-writing workshops Museion Ink. In 2021 we collaborated for the exhibition “MAPS. Dall'archivio Museion” and “Bolzanism Atlas” public program.
Two other important stakeholders have been the Municipality’s Archive and the oral archive of the library Claudia Augusta, that have collaborated with us in the research about the neighbourhoods and the public housing buildings.
Throughout the first three years of BZM we also collaborated with many organizations at a local and national level (developing even more events, exhibitions and talks) such as Foto-forum and Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare, BAW Bolzano Art Weeks, OUTBOX collective, Youthmagazine, Cooltour, Analogica, The Chioskito collective, Pergine Festival, Invasioni creative e Banca del Fare, Fantasma collective, Associazione Cas’aupa.
Bolzanism is a collective project carried out since 2017 by three different organizations: a cultural and audiovisual production cooperative (Cooperativa 19), an architecture collective (Campomarzio), and a theater (Teatro Cristallo). The Bolzanism project is developed through the interaction between the expertise of the three organizations and collaboration with researchers and students in different fields of knowledge and different disciplines: architecture, history, sociology, anthropology, design, communication, performance and storytelling.
The various methodologies of inquiry are used in synergy with each other to produce a layered narrative about the meaning of collective living.
Bolzanism takes the form of a project of cultural mediation between the architecture of buildings and the history of people through a continuous process of interaction between all the disciplines involved.
The goal of Bolzanism's research is to develop in people a greater awareness of their history and their city and to involve the inhabitants of Bozen West's neighborhoods in the process of re-signification and re-discovery of the places where they live.
The main challenge of Bolzanism is to make the result of field research usable to a wide audience. To do this, a methodology of inquiry has been developed that is based on micro-history, intended here as the collection through interviews and archival sources of the memories, tales and small domestic stories of the inhabitants. These materials are important for reconstructing the impact that the city's historical events have had on the community and for reconnecting private memories and public events. Bolzanism's storytelling activity is based on a re-elaboration of these materials with a focus on "usable history" to communicate complex concepts without depleting them, to be close to people's lived experience, and to stimulate a sense of belonging to places.
Since the opening of BZM in 2020 we’ve been assessing our impact producing a report every year. Through the administration of a questionnaire we’ve been able to gather a lot of data about the visitors and on the impacts the museum has had on them and on their perception of Bolzano’s peripheral districts.
In our first 3 years of activity we had 1411 visitors, 22,4% are from the districts, 39,8% from other neighbourhoods of Bolzano, and 37,8% are outsiders. These data confirms a general interest in discovering Bolzano from new perspectives and a desire to get to know the most authentic city.
BZM brings people to discover Bozen West for the first time: 25% of our visitors had not been in Don Bosco and Europa Novacella districts before visiting us. On a strategic level this emphasises that offering cultural alternatives in the suburbs is the way to enrich a city's image and engage people in alternative routes. The museum has worked on a proposal that has succeeded in making the periphery a cultural subject.
One of the slogans of the BZM is 'Change Perspective!', intended both as an exhortation to look at the periphery of Bolzano in a different way and as an invitation to those who live there to rethink their places. In the first three years of BZM 87,2% of the visitors who are also residents affirms to have learned new things about their neighbourhood and 76,5% affirms that their perspective has changed in a positive way. In the meantime 97,6% of outsiders affirms to have learned new things about the districts and 64,2% affirmed that their perspective on the districts has improved positively after visiting BZM.
Another important data concerns BZM’s economic impact on the neighbourhood. We wanted to find out who among the visitors stopped in the district to use its services before or after their visit. Of those who do not live in the district, 50% used commercial services to make purchases, demonstrating the potential of the museum to enhance this part of the city.
Developing a collective “museum”
BZM re-thinks the idea and the approach of a museum by creating an open process of development of its contents through different participatory tools that involve contributors at various levels (inhabitants, organisations, archives, other museums…). The narration and the content of the museum are developed as a collective process rather than through an institutional top-down approach. In this sense we can actually intend BZM as a museum on public housing buildings and of the people that inhabit them.
Urban narration through innovative tools
BZM is not the first initiative to suggest walking as a way of exploring and discovering a city. But our Bolzanism Walks are not only a guided walking tour, are not only the telling of the stories of the inhabitants, are not only the account of the architectural and urban planning processes or of the history of public housing, they are not only a theatrical performance. They are all this together. Through theatre and storytelling we were able to create an innovative way of re-discovering the city that could be informative, fun, accessible and captivating in order to convey our contents and to engage a wide public.
The mix of approaches, disciplines, knowledge fields
One of the strengths of Bolzanism is that, even though from its very beginning our focus has been the history of Bozen West and of its public housing buildings, the BZM is not only about architecture itself but rather about narrating the human and cultural heritage connected to it. In order to do so, we have always involved a mix of other approaches (such as cultural production, street-theatre, geography, sociology, history…). By mixing different disciplines and knowledge fields in our Walks and in our events/workshops our aim is to show that really it is the suburbs and their multifaceted vitality that give a city its meaning.
The very core of the Bolzanism experience is a traveling theater play in which the microhistories of popular architectures and its designers are interwoven with the urban history of Bolzano and the stories of its inhabitants in a narrative that engages the viewer in a process of re-semantization of the periphery. The goal is to narrate the places that are called "suburbs," to tell and communicate the value of those neighborhoods and architectures, encouraging critical thinking about the present.
The Bolzanism project's approach emphasizes micro-history as a tool for giving value to everyday life, biographical details, remembrances and individual and collective memories. The process of collecting personal micro-histories, consisting of interviews and personal relationships with public housing residents but also archival research, established a relationship of trust and interest that motivated the participation of residents in the project.
The innovative aspect of Bolzanism moreover is to apply this methodology of investigation and storytelling to individual housing complexes, constructing a kind of "ethnography of buildings" that transforms popular architecture into "speaking objects", pillars of the identity of a community that inhabits and modifies them and in which it recognizes itself.
Finally, the narrative and theatrical mode of urban explorations developed by Bolzanism, mixing tales and details with the facts of national and local history, activates a process of "cultural mediation," suggesting interpretive "short-circuits" of one's own horizon of life, constructing in the space of imagination a meaning to places and contexts considered "marginal".
Every territory has its history and by uncovering its peculiarity each city has the potential to be narrated in an innovative way. Even though social or public housing might be the main focus only for the peculiar context of Bolzano, the whole process behind the museum’s construction could be transferred elsewhere:
the creation of urban walks that bring insiders and outsiders to re-discover some neglected parts of a city
the use of creative and accessible tools such as storytelling and theatre to talk about local history/architecture/urbanism
the involvement of the community through interviews and meetings
to create a shared narration that connects general history with the micro-history of inhabitants
the temporary transformation of public space through self-building and the use of local and sustainable materials
the involvement of young “storytellers” through didactic workshops
planning events/workshop etc in collaboration with other organizations to constantly involve the residents and new publics
Cities worldwide are facing the need of finding new processes to address the gap between centres and peripheries. BZM inserts itself into this discourse by shedding light on the suburbs historical, cultural and human heritage and by providing new ways of creating a new narration and a sense of belonging within the communities.
Projects like Bolzanism highlight the importance of creating new identities for the suburbs, by manifesting their potential for being centres of cultural and social innovation, experimentation and even tourism.
Global trends on tourism have confirmed the ever growing interest toward local tourism which brings people more and more to nearby destinations. The 'suburbs' increasingly qualifies as a new destination capable of narrating authentic social, historical and anthropological phenomena and of restoring the complex image of a city capable of offering something other than the historic centre, which has become stereotyped in postcard images. The data that we collected confirm the intuition that the 'periphery’ can be a new destination, but we are aware of the importance of avoiding the triggering of dynamics such as musealisation, mythologisation, aestheticization of the suburbs. In order to do so we constantly investigate the perception of the inhabitants towards the Bolzanism Museum. The data collected returned a very positive judgement on the activities, but we are well aware that the sustainable development of projects like BZM is to keep renewing and consolidating the relationships with those living in the neighbourhoods.
