Mudec gets a makeover: new permanent exhibit all about globalization

From September 17, 2021, the Mudec Museo delle Culture in Milan renews its permanent collection with a new exhibition entitled Global Milan. The World Seen from Here. Five years after the museum’s opening, the permanent exhibition presents the public with previously unseen objects and well-known masterpieces from the collections of Mudec and other city collections. The theme is globalization and the major processes that have led to the physiognomy of the contemporary city. The renewed itinerary aims to recount some of the phenomena that have profoundly transformed our society, starting with particularly significant Milanese and Lombard works and stories.

In a new itinerary of about five hundred works from different eras, materials, typologies and cultures, the public will have the opportunity to retrace some of the fundamental themes of global history through a Milanese lens.

Milan has been called the most “international” city in Italy. Although it was for a short time the capital of the Roman Empire, it was especially at the beginning of the modern age that the city’s international profile began to be defined. the new exhibition starts from here: the city, its territory and its social and economic fabric will be inserted into broader dynamics: from the era of great navigations to the consumer society, from the colonial age to multicultural Milan. “Mudec’s new Permanente keeps in step with the transformations of our society,” says museum director Anna Maria Montaldo, “responding to the need of the citizenry to understand contemporaneity and to the demands and needs of educators to train in interculturalism. The itinerary is designed to provide tools to address complex issues, such as migration and colonialism, with an awareness of what the past has been, in order to build a future of dialogue.”

The new layout of the permanent collection is divided into five sections. In the first section(Milan in the Spanish World) the city projects itself on an international scale: in fact, from the 16th century it became part of the chessboard of the Spanish Empire. Trade with America allows the arrival of non-European objects that enter the city’s collections, such as those of Manfredo Settala. Silver from the Bolivian mines of Potosi also arrives in the city, destined along with other metals to be processed into weapons, suntuary products and coins for all of Europe. The impact of American silver would prove disruptive on the world economy, and devastating would be the implications for Native American peoples and their territory, with repercussions as far away as West Africa, from where people were kidnapped to serve as slaves in the metal refining ingenios and for other economic activities to benefit colonial economies. The Americas, where the longest-lived colonial system ever began, were the scene of complex societies as old as the Mesopotamian ones: a large showcase testifies to the variety and sophistication of material culture through a large installation displaying the clay art of the central Andes between 3000 B.C.C. until the conquest (1532).The last part of the room is dedicated to cocoa, which, along with objects and metals, arrived from the vast Iberian world, changing the eating habits of the entire planet.

The second section(The New Global Dimension of the Asian Continent) starts with the consumption of coffee and tea, both of which originate from the Eastern world: this is also where many of the objects used as containers for these beverages come from. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the fashion for the consumption of certain “new” foods reserved for royalty and courts spread to Europe, but already enjoying widespread popularity by the end of the eighteenth century. China becomes hegemonic in the export market for luxury goods, including fine porcelain. The image of the Eastern world, seen by Europeans as a mythical place, becomes highly fashionable and spreads to the applied arts (including in Lombardy), giving rise to the phenomenon of chinoiserie, Western imitations inspired by Chinese, Japanese, and Indian decorative models. The world of textiles, with its decorative motifs and materials originating in the East, hybridized to meet the taste of European fashion. Milan and its burgeoning textile industry also became part of this complex phenomenon, both with its own productions and by importing fashionable textiles.

The third section(The Race for Africa) starts from the fact that at the end of the eighteenth century the European powers impart a military turn to strictly commercial activities, aimed at controlling vast unindustrialized territories, such as Africa. Giuseppe Vigoni traveled for commercial purposes following the Società di Esplorazione Commerciale in Africa based in Milan since 1879. Later, the Kingdom of Italy would mature the decision for military intervention by occupying parts of Tripolitania, Eritrea and Somalia, a prelude to fascist-driven colonialism focused on the final conquest of Libya and Eritrea. A nucleus of unpublished works from the former War Museum allows for a reflection on the cultural bearing of Italy’s colonial past: the objects that came to Milan to celebrate the military exploits in Ethiopia allow for the development of a narrative that, reversing the intentions of the coeval, focuses on the identity and history of the Ethiopian population. Posters, scientific or entertainment magazines, documents and everyday objects describe the problematic relationship with the “colonized” and the contradictory representation of the “other” full of clichés, highlighting the repercussion of this feeling on Milanese and Italian society. A mode of relationship that was consolidated during the two decades of Fascism that remains present in post-World War II civil society. The Berlin Conference (1884-1885) marks the Western occupation of much of the African continent. Two focuses, devoted to war and religion, document through the works European colonialism and African forms of resistance and resilience. Modernity and tradition are not presented as successive to each other, but as contemporary in their shaping of each other within the colonial situation.

The fourth section(From Decolonization to Multiculturalism) documents the process of Italian decolonization that developed rapidly in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Libya; the influence on Somalia, on the other hand, was prolonged until the end of the protectorate that was supposed to prepare the African country for independence in 1960. Since World War II, a certain apologetic current has led to the construction and dissemination of the myth of the “Italians good people”; on the other hand, from the 1970s until the 2000s, a new historiographic current has engaged in a critical revision of Italy’s colonial past. It is within this context, not only of critique of the colonial past but also of analysis of the memory of colonialism, that the present works fit. The city of Milan emerges destroyed from the great world conflict. The international and entrepreneurial matrix that the city has absorbed over the centuries plays a fundamental role in Italy’s economic boom. In the transition from industrial to service city, Milan welcomes people from Africa, Asia and America.

The fifth and final section(Afrodescendants in Global Milan) presents Milan, a multicultural metropolis and global city, as seen through the eyes of the “Afrodescendants” who live there, with the intention of showing how they contribute to changing the city and the sense of being Milanese and Italian. It is to intersect the forms of self and hetero representation, historically inherited or currently produced, that make these people visible or invisible, configuring symbolic identities claimed or suffered. The frame is constituted by the representations, often stereotyped, that make up the imaginary about black people in Italy: advertising images, films, songs, political propaganda, but also the media models of celebrity culture, while the heart of the room is constituted by the multiple forms of self-representation put forth by the Milanese “Afro-descendants” and in particular by those who, working in the world of cultural and creative industries, influence common sense.

The entire project is based on an open and participatory approach to the process of conceiving and setting up the exhibition hall (which characterized both this last section and the previous ones) through workshops and discussions in presence and remotely, with a polyphonic approach aimed at avoiding the “danger of a single story.” Hence also the decision to invite professionals of word and image (artists, designers, musicians, videomakers, writers, influencers) to exhibit both for the quality of their works and for their ability to contribute to articulating the symbolic spaces within which groups and people can recognize themselves from their similarities and differences and imagine their own futures.

Image: Alan Maglio, African Portraits (2004, photographic print)

Mudec gets a makeover: new permanent exhibit all about globalization

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