Culture shall set you free: An Italian Museum Facing Political Backlash For Being Inclusive
Or, when a cultural organization makes headlines for the wrong reasons — and it’s not its fault.
Yesterday, a far-right Italian politician used its Facebook profile to denounce a supposed case of favoritism toward “non-Italians”, made by a pre-eminent museum institution.
The Egyptian Museum in Turin, which hosts the second biggest collection of ancient Egyptian heritage after the one in Cairo, had decided to engage with the relevant Arab community of the city with a campaign offering a 1x2 ticket combo to Arab-speaking citizens. The museum had decided to promote the offer with ads written in Arab, to appeal to the 49 000 people strong Arab community living in Turin (where overall foreign residents make for 15,5% of the population).
Somehow, news of the initiative got to Giorgia Meloni, a far-right, conservative politician, highly committed to supposedly preserve Italian values and traditions against any form of foreign influence. According to her, the idea of offering a discount that would reward non-Italian speaking people was nothing less than “nonsensical”.
Of course, the museum replied that the offer had been part of a larger marketing and audience engagement campaign, destined to attract larger audiences, especially from communities with strong cultural connections with the collections.
While anyone with some common sense and/or some form of professional experience in marketing could only agree with the idea and would find nothing strange or outrageous in the initiative, the same clearly seems to not apply for politicians, who always try to bend facts in accordance to their agenda.
Being not a naive myself, I can fully understand the manipulative process, but I cannot avoid to be worried by this episode: in this case, an internationally-renowned cultural institution had the embraceable idea to engage with new publics, pursuing the double goal to implement its service to the community while possibly increasing its revenues.
Leaving the laughable political controversy aside, what results worrying is the financial-economic implication: the politician, in fact, accused the institution to take advantage from “public” funding — paid by good, Italian citizens with their taxes — to support discount initiatives to non-Italian citizens. Beside the fact that most of these supposed non-Italians are citizens working in the country and paying their taxes in Italy, the issue that emerges from this otherwise negligible proto-racist episode is the absolute necessity, for cultural institutions, to protect and, if not yet achieved, pursue full financial independence.
While being self-sufficient should be a priority per se for all cultural organizations, episodes like these remind us of how financial autonomy can give the institutional strength to pursue ambitious (and possibly controversial) cultural strategies without being threatened or undermined by the first politician with a (stupid) agenda.
In our case, in fact, the Egyptian Museum is an fully self-sufficient foundation, receiving no public funding: thanks to this condition (allowed also by the progressive increase of the public achieved through campaigns like the one discussed here), it was able to shut down the controversy, while preserving its immaculate status as an inclusive, open, innovative cultural institution.
In times of irrational fear and perceived insecurity like the one we are living, museums must be able to preserve their organizational and cultural independence, to pursue their mission and to stay inclusive and impartial: they can — and must — work as social buffers, diluting tensions and frictions. What this episode can teach us is that this can be achieved only as long as museums can progressively free themselves from political conditioning powers, trying to occasionally break into the otherwise ignored and overlooked cultural sector for the sake of a few likes on a Facebook post.
I stand by the Egyptian Museum, and by all the cultural organizations around the world that must face big and small obstacles to pursue their mission: we all owe you to keep our society safer and inclusive, whether some might acknowledge it or not.
