A World-Famous Curator Is Working 18-Hour Days to Put One of Italy’s Top Museums Online So Italians Can Visit From Quarantine

The
Castello di Rivoli near Turin, like every other museum in Italy,
has been forced to close amid the coronavirus epidemic.

But
its director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, is working 18-hour
days to fast-froward the museum’s digital initiatives to make its
exhibitions and collections accessible online. 

Taking
a break, Christov-Bakargiev tells Artnet News that it’s the
museum’s “public duty,”
as 60 million Italians have been placed under lockdown.

Virtual Tours

To
make it all possible, Christov-Bakargiev and her team have been
scrambling to record and edit new virtual tours of the Modern and
contemporary art museum, which had just opened three special
exhibitions before the forced lockdown was put in place. They are
posting them online in a new virtual venue called “Digital
Cosmos.”

The curator started by focusing on
still lifes in the collection by artists including Giorgio
Morandi. A spokesperson said the decision was made because the
genre has often served as a way for artists to ruminate on
nature and mortality.

Among
the first works in the Castello di Rivoli collection to be featured
in the new series is Maurizio Cattelan’s embalmed horse,
Novecento
(1900) (1997), which hangs from the ceiling in a
sling. Works by artists including Michael
Rakowitz, Giuseppe Penone, Ed Atkins, James Richards, and Renato
Leotta will also be included in the initiative.

The
museum is also creating online tours aimed at children and their
parents who are stuck at home now that all schools are
closed.

“It is
important for people’s state of mind,” Christov-Bakargiev tells
Artnet News. She also hopes art will be a welcome alternative to
the continual, and stressful, stream of public health
warnings. 

Italy Under
Lockdown

Two weeks ago, the Castello
di Rivoli, along with other museums in Milan and Venice, were
instructed to close. Last week, after they were briefly allowed to
reopen, they were shut down again on Saturday. On Monday,
the 14 quarantined “red zones” in Northern Italy were
extended across the whole of the country. Large-scale gatherings,
including sporting events, have been forbidden.

That means that the Palazzo
Strozzi’s sprawling Tomás Saraceno exhibition is
now closed.

“It is
very sad to shut the doors,” says the museum’s
director, Arturo Galansino. “[Saraceno’s] show
speaks about how we are part of a net of connections, and how all
our individual and collective actions count.”

With most of his staff working at
home, he hopes to announce a series of digital initiatives in the
coming days.

Meanwhile, the Uffizi is launching a social
media campaign to keep people in touch with art. The museum’s
Instagram and Twitter pages will be updated daily with photos,
videos, and stories focused on the masterpieces in its collection.
The gallery has also started a new dedicated Facebook
page, and will be updating its
YouTube account. 

“Even
though museums have had to close their doors, art doesn’t stop,”
the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt, said in a
statement.

The
campaign has been named the #UffiziDecameron in a nod
to Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century novel, The
Decameron, in which 10 young people take refuge in the hills
above Florence to escape the plague, telling stories to combat
boredom.

“The
Uffizi will be with you, in your homes, to overcome all together
the current difficult moment,” the museum said in a statement. “Let
us avoid any contagion, except that of beauty.” 

The
museum will also be hosting a series of virtual mini-tours in which
museum assistants will share some of their favorite parts of the
galleries on video.

Finally, the galleries are producing
content to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Raphael.
The initiative will go some way in offsetting the closure of a
major Raphael
exhibition in Rome, to which the Uffizi lent around 50 works.
(But you can also see that show
online.)

The post A World-Famous Curator Is Working 18-Hour Days to
Put One of Italy’s Top Museums Online So Italians Can Visit From
Quarantine appeared first on artnet News.