Museo Nazionale dell'Emigrazione Italiana (MEI)

Abstract

When I visited Genoa, I encountered a multicultural and multiracial city full of diverse people, colors, aromas, and delicacies. It captivated me, as I had never visited such a city in the Italian North. In this framework, I considered the establishment of Italy's National Museum of Emigration (MEI) in Genoa as fitting.I visited on the day of the museum's inauguration, May 11, 2022. Upon entry, I was given a bracelet with a near-field communication (NFC) sensor, which I used throughout the facility to access audiovisual narratives for the displays. To activate the NFC bracelet, I created a digital passport by submitting my name, age, and gender at an interactive station in the museum. The digital passport reinforced a personalized visitor experience, inviting me to put myself in the shoes of a migrant.Generally, the museum's exhibition spaces depended on digital projections and interactive applications enhanced with personal narratives, either original or ones re-created for the purpose of the exhibition. Through this choice, elusive and subjective aspects of the migration experience were conveyed successfully. There were few artifacts on display, and some scenographic environments with embedded digital media sought to transform the museum visit into an experience. An immersive, mazelike installation on the second floor, for instance, was evocative of the stressful experience of migrants in the receiving country and the dilemmas they often confront. In my view, the lack of literal theatrical reconstructions was a positive aspect of the museum, as their employment in migration museums can lead the viewer to a narrow interpretation of the represented theme (Lanz 2016, 187). The absence of artifacts, on the other hand, did not function in a similar manner. Tangible objects associated with migrations, such as keepsakes or biographical or identity objects, carry a great deal of evocative and symbolic power, and their inclusion in a museum can significantly strengthen the viewer's understanding and engagement with the exhibition.As far as storytelling was concerned, the museum's content unraveled over three floors, and the exhibition narratives were thematic. The museological itinerary was linear on the ground floor, to recount the migration experience, and multifocal1 on the next two floors, which meant that the visitor did not have to view sections in a specific order to understand the exhibition's message. The museum's introductory space on the ground floor took us back two hundred thousand years, and our journey began with an ancient story about human mobility, the story of homo sapiens. The multimedia station's interface read, “Homo sapiens una specie migrante,” making an important acknowledgement: Migration is a regular phenomenon of “human experience since its origin,”2 hence its intrinsic status within our species.In addition to the expansion of homo sapiens from Africa to other continents, the introduction presented four more types of migration that occurred within Italy before the country's unification. The following section, titled “Who Sets Off,” functioned in a similar manner but this time in the Italian national context. Featuring five original personal stories of Italians who emigrated in 2010, 1954, 1939, 1908, and 1854, the museum portrayed Italians as a people on the move, irrespective of their social status, gender, ethno-regional identification, or the chronology of mobility. In doing so, it humanized the experience of migration by foregrounding the feelings, motives, and misfortunes of people who migrate. We read in the text panel, “Migrants are not just a sociological category, mere players in a global phenomenon; they are first of all people.” By drawing links between different migration patterns and experiences throughout history, the exhibition cultivated empathy and shared a powerful message to the public while also reflecting contemporary museological theory and practices.Considering that the conceptualization of Italians as a people on the move occurred in a national museum, the exhibition's content acquired an additional meaning. In my view, the utmost goal was to portray Italian migration as an integral experience in Italian history. Moreover, the fact that all the oral narratives included in the museum were in Italian3 reflected the museum's strategy to address Italian nationals.The first floor of the exhibition presented migration mostly in relation to the Italian national context. Α significant area was dedicated to the section “Emigration and Politics,” which encompassed a timeline and a multimedia projection. This section presented how the political discourse on emigration in Italy has changed throughout the twentieth century, interpreting the phenomenon as either a threat or an opportunity for the expansion of the Italian nation. The largest part of the floor encompassed the unit “Destination: The World,” which presented a map illustrating the emigration of Italians to North, Central, and South America, and to Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Europe. The map was depicted on large tables at the center of the space, and digital and interactive monitors were used as pins on each continent to offer a closer examination. Text panels were displayed around the tables, inviting visitors to navigate a circular path without a specific sequence. The personal narratives embedded in the monitors showcased the diversity of experiences within each settlement to avoid conceptualizing migrant communities as homogenous. At the same time, the communities of emigrants were conceptualized as originating from a common center—the Italian nation-state.The second floor of the exhibition, on the other hand, attempted to work in a transnational and transcultural direction. The sections “The Maze,” “Work, Work, Work,” and “Migrations and Communities” illustrated the difficult situations that Italian immigrants encountered as foreigners in lands with different customs, traditions, and working conditions. In the “Migration and Communities” section, for instance, the “In-Between Two Communities” projection illustrated how traditional Italian beliefs clashed with the modern ones in the United States on the topics of food, love, and the role of women in work. Since storytelling in these sections was thematic, the curators had to cope with a diversity of experiences to illustrate the commonalities of each experience. In my view, this choice sometimes resulted in a generic story of migration rather than a historically nuanced one. The choice to include some scripted oral narratives enacted by actors (instead of original testimonies)4 also contributed to a feeling of generalization. I felt the display about cultural in-betweenness of migrants could receive further conceptual, visual, and spatial emphasis in the overall exhibition,5 considering its centrality in the experience of migrant communities, even into the third and fourth generations. Since some exhibition displays on this floor (i.e., “The Maze”) did not have their audiovisual oral narratives uploaded yet,6 the exhibition may expand in this direction in the coming months.It is important to note that the overall narrative of the museum was not idealized, romanticized, or nostalgic, contrary to how national or ethnic-specific museums in the United States often represent immigration to America.7 The experience of migration was not depicted as a story of assimilation, inclusion, and upward socioeconomic mobility in the receiving countries. The museum did not avoid addressing controversial topics, either. Race relations and working-class struggles were acknowledged,8 whereas those who made it9 constituted only one aspect of the experience displayed (along with mafiosi and undocumented immigrants). In addition, the representation of migration did not reinforce traditional gender roles. The place of women in migration history was equally visible to that of men. Although the integration of migration history into the Italian national narrative was the goal of the exhibition, MEI did not perpetuate ethnic myths and stereotypes, such as the model minority narrative. On the contrary, the transformation of Italian ethnicity through its encounters is a topic that has received scarce critical exploration in American museums (Ruberto and Sciorra 2018), so the subject's integration into MEI's displays is an important contribution.Considering that some European countries such as Greece have not yet established migration as a historical narrative in school textbooks or museums, the scope of MEI appears to be very important. The museum can contribute to the public's understanding of migration in both its historical and contemporary dimensions. Given the current immigration/refugee crisis in Europe, becoming knowledgeable about historic migration could contribute to combating racism and achieving solidarity between diverse arrival groups of immigrants in the present. It is important to note that MEI did in fact draw links between Italian emigrants and contemporary immigrants to Italy in its memorial inscription on the first floor.10Fostering the public discourse on migration through a museum can cultivate a historical understanding and self-awareness that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state. This historical understanding, in turn, may enable the shaping of identities that are not nation-centric to illustrate the “growing ethnic-cultural mix that characterizes contemporary society” (Lanz 2016, 178). To succeed, this conceptualization requires acknowledging the transnational context within which people and ideas circulate. It also entails illustrating the transnational framework within which identities are formed, both in the emigration and immigration experiences. As many scholars have established, migrant communities are actively shaped by transnational discourses and phenomena occurring simultaneously in the originating and the receiving countries (Anagnostou 2009; Kalogeras 2007; Laliotou 2004); hence the complex aspect of their experiences, their status of cultural in-betweenness, and their “segmented identities” (Chryssanthopoulou 2018, 119–141), which merge regional, ethnic, national, and transnational identifications.That said, a possible route of expansion for the museum is toward a conceptualization of migrant identity surpassing Italian ethnicity and celebrating more boldly its hybrid, fluid, and complex nature. Including foreign immigration experiences to Italy would be welcomed11 considering the institution's goal to humanize the experience of migration. I believe that Genoa is the ideal location for the establishment of such a space through the venue of a national Italian museum.