"Do we really want to go back to the situation that existed before the closure?" Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi, speaks.

by Federico Giannini (Instagram: @federicogiannini1), published on 30/03/2020
Categories: Interviews / Disclaimer

How is Italy’s most visited museum, namely the Uffizi Gallery (along with the museums in its cluster), coping with the health emergency over the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic? What will museums have to do when there is a restart? How will visitor flows change and how will the Uffizi and museums in general need to prepare? We asked in this exclusive interview with Eike D. Schmidt, director of the Uffizi Galleries. The interview is edited by Federico Giannini, editor in chief of Windows on Art.

Eike Schmidt

FG. Like all museums in Italy, the Uffizi has been forced to close to the public, but in return they have intensified their activities on social media: you have even landed on Facebook. How have you organized work for these days of forced closure? How are the activities proceeding?

ES. The most successful channel continues to be Instagram, with now over 445 thousand followers, but since March 8 we also see a significant daily increase on Twitter, which in our case is a somewhat niche channel but with a very loyal and engaged audience, with a high degree of engagement. But perhaps most notable of all was the landing on Facebook the day after the country closed. In the first eighteen days we collected more than 37 thousand followers, and some of the videos were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. Under the rubric #UffiziDecameron we offer videos, photos and texts that are inspired by the principle of Boccaccio’s opera, contrasting the strength of thanatos with the threat of thanatos, and storytelling with the boredom of isolation. We have calibrated communication on Instagram to the current situation, while we continue with the winning formula of offering a photo, a group of photos or a few-second microvideo from our collections every day, paired with a text, always bilingual in Italian and English. On Facebook, on the other hand, we post a video of about three minutes each morning. Especially popular is the #lamiasala series, in which curators, assistants, conservators and so on (the people who in normal times every day experience the museum) present their favorite spaces and works in the Galleries.

These days we have seen an increase in audience on social: normal, since we are all housebound. Have you thought of strategies to convert what is now visiting you through the Web into a physical audience?

It is the virtual audience itself that frequently expresses a desire to visit us after we reopen. Those who like our collections online would also like to see them on-site.

The coronavirus is making the rounds around the world, and probably, given also the response of different countries and given the time it will take to find a cure and a vaccine, it may not take a year to get back to normal. In your opinion, how should the world of culture in general and the world of museums in particular be organized?

The return to normalcy is at this time a great dream for everyone, and this is understandable and shareable. However, this suspension of business as usual must lead us to ask: Do we really want to return to exactly the situation we left on March 8? Aren’t there some things to be done differently, perhaps even some habits developed during the period of collective quarantine that we would like to bring into our future normalcy? These days we often read that nothing will ever be the same again, yet it should be remembered that there is no automatism in change. The ideas, beliefs and utopias that arise in this period must be actively imposed on the world when we reopen, because it is too easy to pick up exactly where we left off, without changing anything in our behaviors. Think of pollution and petty crime, now greatly reduced, but on the verge of returning as before the very day of national reopening. Among the technical measures of the current emergency, I hope that people will henceforth no longer be ashamed to put on their masks but instead adopt the habit of putting them on when they accuse the slightest symptom of a cold, as has been the case in Asia for decades, saving not only so much expense to the health care system but also hundreds of lives from the common flu. As in many other areas, in the cultural and museum world the coronavirus emergency is first and foremost giving a huge boost to digitization. The challenge in the immediate future will be to rebalance and make the digital and real spheres interact in productive and interesting ways congenial to the particular conditions of both these worlds. Incredibly still today many people see online communication only as an opportunity to advertise museum visits, concerts, and so on. This means leaving out 99% of the potential that digital offers us.

The last international event that had an impact on our lives was the wave of terrorist attacks in 2015: since then our squares have been filled with concrete barriers, metal detectors at museum entrances have increased, there has been an increase in surveillance. Do you think that this emergency will bring further changes in the way people visit museums and, more generally, places of tourism?

It is a fact that in recent decades new epidemics have always emerged, which until the current emergency had never become global pandemics: this should first of all make us aware that there will be more in the future. Therefore, we need to prepare ourselves. I am not an expert, but considering what happened in this circumstance and looking at what the channels of spread of the contagion were, it occurs to me that it would be, for example, useful to have check-points to carry out blanket health checks, perhaps installing them at the main nodes of people flows, i.e., at airports, train and bus stations, and make them operational when the need arises. In some Asian countries in times of alert, monitoring protocols are also activated for all public buildings, including museums and schools, and companies must measure the temperature of all employees twice a day. For museums, I see above all the need to manage entry through an algorithm (like the one we have already developed and extensively tested at the Uffizi in collaboration with the University of L’Aquila) to eliminate queues and stagger entries according to criteria that can also incorporate social distancing measures if necessary. The computerized management of entrances ensures not only a more pleasant and humane visit, but together with the queues it eliminates a potential target for terrorism and, as we can now add, also an opportunity for microbiological contagion.

There has long been discussion in Italy about how to mitigate mass tourism and its effects, since large masses of visitors inevitably transform our cities (and Florence is one example). In your opinion, can new or different tourism/cultural policies emerge from this crisis, which is now a health crisis but will soon become an economic crisis?

By necessity new cultural and tourism policies have to emerge, but it cannot be a spontaneous process. We have to be committed to it. No other country is as rich in artistic and scenic treasures scattered throughout its territory as Italy. Therefore, nature and history have already prepared aenormous opportunity that is completely lacking elsewhere: that of redesigning tourist flows according to a revaluation of the entire national territory. The main obstacle so far has always been excessive parochialism, and special interests stronger than the common good. And it is precisely special interests that have unfortunately fostered the phenomena ofovertourism and neglect of ecology. Digitization, which during the current period of national quarantine is proceeding with great strides, will be able to be of crucial help in this regard as well. Strong enhancement of agile work, for example, would reduce commuting and could revive or help build small social and economic cores in the suburbs. In addition, slow tourism should be promoted: instead of ten trips-hopping to run after the exhibitions and music festivals of the moment, it would undoubtedly be more instructive for everyone, and healthier for our planet, to take fewer but longer trips.

In the coming months we can expect major drops in visitor numbers: it will take time to recover from this phase. Have you already thought about how the Uffizi (and, in general, all the museums in the cluster) will react when faced with having to operate at a reduced regime?

We are very well prepared for the reduced regime because of the four months of low season that we experience every year but that since 2018, thanks to the various measures of deseasonalization (reduced ticket prices, concentration of exhibitions in the winter months, etc.), have become “mid-low.” However, the opposite could also happen, after a transition period or even right away. Because the message we receive most among the comments on social media and through e-mail is: When this crisis ends, the first thing I would like to do is to return to the Uffizi. And this is not only from our fans who may have the Passepartout pass (whose validity, by the way, will be increased for the equivalent of non-use due to the forced closure), but also from people who have only been once to our museums, on a school trip or honeymoon, years ago.

However, there is still the possibility that there will be declines in large tourist flows. And most likely this eventuality will force museums to look much more strongly at local communities, trying to engage them as they never did before. So do you think that in the future we will have museums that are closer to their cities, more able to involve their inhabitants? Perhaps with extraordinary openings, hours that allow visits even to those who work during the day, new pricing policies, new services, new initiatives?

It is true that our extraordinary evening openings during the summer and at other times of high attendance have helped a lot in bringing citizens back to the museum, which is a key strategic goal of ours. But they are not enough. The celebration of identity festivals for the citizenry, from the Florentine and Dante New Year (March 25) to St. John’s Day (June 24), to Anna Maria Luisa de Medici’s Family Pact (Oct. 31), to the Feast of Tuscany in honor of Pietro Leopoldo (Nov. 30), has brought huge numbers of Florentines and Tuscans to our museums. Additional cultural offerings, particularly in the off-season, played no less important a role: from the scheduling of exhibitions in the most difficult period to concerts included in the museum ticket, from the lectures we offered free to the citizens every Wednesday afternoon (and which we look forward to resuming), to the rapidly growing educational workshops, to the engagement also through social media. The proof that this strategy is working is in the numbers of our annual Passepartout subscriptions: we have over 10 thousand subscribers, including almost a thousand families: all people who evidently return to the museum several times a year. Some come so often that I have begun to recognize their physiognomy. We need to continue in this direction, fostering multiple, paced, in-depth enjoyment by citizens and anyone who is truly passionate about alarte and our treasures.

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