PROJECT OBJECTIVES AND INNOVATIVE CHARACTER

The Summer School aims to be as practical action to establish, in the future, the Museum System (Euro) Mediterranean of Design and Applied Arts (OFFICIAMUSEUMED).

The  international scientific community assumes, in this way, the task of encouraging the birth of this  system focused on the creation of a virtuous relationship between museums and manifactures that exist in the same area. With the construction, in Pompeii, of the temporary museum of  enterprises and activation of Officiamuseum (the Regional Museum System Design and Applied Arts), which is the driving force, it is necessary to extend the “system” in a geographically and culturally more extensive. To really make this action strategy for the revival of craft and design – not making constant reference to the European market, especially in these years – you have to devise a The Mediterranean Museum System of Design and Applied Arts. The idea of creating a Regional Museum System of Design and Applied Arts follows a decade that has been crucial for design in Campania (1990/2002). It is marked by a series of experimental collaborations
between fifty-three designers and thirty-one local companies producing local handicraft goods, showing that it is possible to do design in a territory that lacks industries but is rich in local craftsmen.

In 2002, the Second University of Naples, appointed by the Campania Region, Drew up the preliminary project of a “regional museum system of design and applied arts”, with it being conceived as a virtual regional network of twenty-one specialised museums, public and private, of applied art and crafts as well as temporary museum of Campanian business in Pompeii, located along a strategic tourist route in the region that connects Naples with the most important centres of products of excellence in the region. The “Mediterranean Museum System of Design and Applied Arts” is entirely in keeping with these broad theme and collective ambition. International agreements promote the creation of these Euro-Mediterranean  relationships.

In particular, the “bridge” created with Turkey as well as Germany is thanks to  bilateral Erasmus agreements drawn up with the University of Cologne in 2007 and Okan University, Istanbul in 2010. Moreover in June of 2012 some professors of these Universities participated at international congress “Le Vie dei Mercanti” about this topic and later they met in Istanbul, in September, to prepare the project of this School. The Mediterranean is part of a larger reality and that in reality the northern part of the Mediterranean is Europe. In fact, in 1995, the Barcelona Declaration (adopted at the Euro-Mediterranean Conference – 27- 28/11/1995) provides an inseparable interrelationship between the Mediterranean and Europe, because «[…] it [Europe] must regain its Mediterranean dimension, that is, its roots, that since ancient times have allowed it to undertake a beneficial exchange of political, cultural and religious experiences. This re-appropriation is, at the same time, a challenge for the future of the “european model”». What does the System propose to do? Specifically, it wants to contribute to a wide area of the Mediterranean (Euro-Mediterranean) in the construction of an alternative design that, despite the crisis, is multiplied with objects, furniture, things/goods that are not created for a particular world. The alternative, therefore, in the hoped-for post-growth society which fully expresses the new values that are have been emerging for some time – such as the selective recovery of the past, authenticity, local traditions as well as cultural heritage – renewing the relationship between design and craft (that was never completely severed in Italy). This objective will have a positive response in the knowledge of a widespread context of microentrepreneurial artisans and manufacturers-holders of ancient manual wisdom. With these subjects, it will be possible to experience new dynamics (as in ampania and other parts of Italy) when introducing into the “design” moment of the craftsman a professional figure that is alien, the designer, thus interrupting the modus fabricandi closed between design, manufacture and sale. The Design Culture could also introduce promotion which is usually absent in handicraft production as well as modernize product distribution. The Officiamuseumed project can save crafts from isolation by introducing them into a broader economic and productive context; promoting the transformation of small artisans into businesses, always small, but implemented by the Design; aggregating them through the existing museums of applied arts and crafts. Officiamuseumed can be divided into a series of local “subsystems” in different regions of the Mediterranean and become, with their respective central organisations – the new design museums – a “Mediterranean Museum Company” with the task of promoting the development of these new companies with excellent products of a territory so vast through the careful direction of universities, chambers of commerce and trade associations.