Meetings with extraordinary women

“Meetings with extraordinary women” is a participatory project to build a pop-up museum inspired by the model created by Nina Simon, ex-director of the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, California. A pop-up museum is an exhibit created entirely by the participants. It is the visitors themselves who supply the objects to be exhibited according to a given theme. They write the descriptions and choose where to locate the objects they bring. The participants are, therefore, invited to be co-creators of the exhibit, to actively participate at various levels, from the choice of the object to the staging, and to share with the other participants one’s choices and motivations.

The project is carried out over 12 months and foresees a series of activities: publications about the project, the creation of informative material, the search for subscriptions and the creation of working groups. There are two workshops aimed respectively at women and minors who frequent the place. The Pop-up museum, in which all the women who wish to are invited to actively participate, will be housed within the Spazio Donna and also in other locations in the city. A final product is also prepared in the form of a catalogue of the exhibition.

Last but not least, the project brings a museum to San Basilio, not a museum made of big names and famous works but one built from bottom-up, speaking the same language as the people who build it.