Queer Self-Representation Inside the Museum

Abstract

Most museums claim to foster the democratisation of their collections through top-down educational programmes. However, it is possible to challenge this perspective and, instead, encourage self-empowerment in lieu of imitation, hosting, and fostering cultural contributions offered by different communities that cultivate independent paths toward creating identities and institutional recognition. Although ‘discrimination’ seems to be a constitutive feature of museums, in that their entire structure is based on exclusion/inclusion processes at multiple levels, their structure offers unlimited possibilities to enact different approaches. If we consider museums as hypertexts that enable continuous re-readings, we can adopt them as generative spaces for critical and innovative practices. Several events that took place at the Modern Art Museum of Bologna (MAMbo) over the past decade show different approaches to tackling discrimination in museums. Each offered a range of reflections and activities concerning specific topics: the audience of sightless people in contemporary art museums (Collezioni mai viste, 2008), women’s art (Autoritratti, 2013), and gender representations (Performing Gender, 2015). Each event was developed as a research action project and carried out by groups strongly committed to contemporary art, respectively representing communities of sightless people, women, and LGBTQI+. Framing specificity as a tool for more diverse forms of representation, museums might question their own history, collections, practices and contexts, cooperating with existing communities representing cultural diversity to foster new narratives and enable the creation of new sources for different discourses and histories to be told.

Keywords:

• Gender
• LGBTQI+
• Feminism
• Contemporary art
• MAMbo

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to hundreds of people and authors, but in this short space I would like to especially thank Annalisa Cattani, Beatrice Collina, Daniele Del Pozzo, Fabio Fornasari, Tiziana Giuberti, Luisa Perlo, Fernando Torrente, and Daniela Comani for their generous assistance in preparing this article.

Notes

1 ‘Frocialista’ is a portmanteau word, derived from frocio (fag) and socialista (socialist). The collective was initially hosted within the headquarters of the Socialist Party.

2 Performing Gender exhibition: http://www.performinggender.eu/resources/. The title referred to Judith Butler’s well-known theories.

3 The title sounds like a pun, since in Italian mai viste, literally ‘never seen’, is also an idiomatic sentence, which means ‘unprecedented’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Uliana Zanetti

Uliana Zanetti is an Italian curator who has worked at the Modern Art Museum of Bologna for over 30 years. She holds a Master’s degree and an Italian third-cycle degree in the History of Contemporary Art from the University of Bologna.