PROJECT PRESENTATION
Born at the behest of the formerly Directorate-General of Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and for Tourism – today Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture – and by AMACI Associazione dei Musei d’Arte Contemporanea Italiani, RAAM – Ricerca Archivio AMACI Musei is an online archive designed to raise awareness of the quantity and quality of public contemporary art heritage, from 1966 to the present day, of the 20 museums that are members of AMACI. The project responds to the need for accessibility and promotion of the public heritage of contemporary art, through means in line with the international standards and today’s tools of fruition, in which the digital world is seen as the ideal means by which to satisfy the need for sharing.
Promotion, valorisation and awareness-raising of contemporary art are thus ever more deeply bound up in the concept of free and rapid accessibility to imagery and information on the works of our national public heritage.
The uniqueness of the project lies in the possibility to bring together the works of 20 museums in a single tool thanks to the coordination of the AMACI network, thus on one hand guaranteeing a census and overview of the heritage represented by sum of the collections of member museums, and on the other, the online presentation of the single works accompanied with available images.
RAAM is an archive in progress, constantly updated and integrated with new records from the museums that contribute to the increase in the public heritage, each in keeping with their own purchasing policies. Within the website, advanced searches may be carried out, and info sheets may be viewed on each artwork, along with information and images concerning the artist, the work and the museum or institution where it is housed.Â
RAAM is not just a useful search tool, but it is also a system that allows users – whether they are professionals from the sector, scholars, museum-goers or mere internauts – to get an idea of the quality, consistency and distribution of the public heritage of contemporary art: the various search filters and the different possible combinations of the orderings of the lists thus facilitate an overall analysis of the heritage from a chronological, museographical, typological etc. point of view. To this end, with pages dedicated to the results of cross-searches, to the single institutions by which a given catalogue is published, with various types of ordering and a brief description of the museum, and with pages dedicated to each artist, RAAM allows for the viewing of parts of the corpus of works to be found in a range of museum collections.
METHODOLOGICAL NOTES
The archive brings together the works produced since 1966 to be found amid the public heritage of the 22 museums supporting the project, insofar as they belong to the museum itself or are on loan from a public institution, both on display and in storage, whether to be found inside the museum venue or away from it. Contemporary works of art using various expressive media are included in this project, from painting to sculpture, from installation to video, via artists’ books and works on paper or using a photographic matrix; however, this initial phase currently excludes engravings, graphics and drawings.
In order to provide ease of consultation, various orderings are foreseen. Viewing the list ordered by artist will offer all the works by one artist in chronological order, while works from the same year are followed by their inventory number.
AMACI put together the data and images of the works present in the catalogues of the single institutions on the basis of the above-mentioned criteria, and after having gathered them and standardised them on a single database, a technical sheet on each work was produced.
Identifying Data:
– owner museum;
– artist: artists are indicated with the names with which they are most commonly known, as are groups and collectives. Where available, reference to artists’ original names is specified in the biographical data;
– artist’s biographical data: for collectives, the place and date of the group’s foundation is given;
– title of the work: the letters s.t. are used for works where the museum does not provide a title;
– date;
– typology: as concerns typology, the museums were provided with a list of options to choose from, in order to guarantee a greater level of uniformity, useful for search purposes;
– medium: the field was compiled by each museum on the basis of the categories and the degree of specificity afforded in each of their archives;
– measurements;
– inventory: the code inserted refers to the museum inventory number;
– juridical status;
– photo credits;
– description;
– bibliography;
– position: indicates whether the work is on display or not;
– biography of the artist: the field is compiled by AMACI on the basis of the information provided by the various institution;
– notes.
All the contents found in the info sheets on the works are the responsibility of the museum to which they belong.
The fields not visible on the online info sheet are those for which data were not provided by the museums or are not currently available.
In keeping with current legislation, the images are loaded onto the platform in low resolution and are not downloadable. However, from every sheet it is possible to contact the manager of the photographic archive of the museum directly, and thus make a formal request for the image in high definition, on the basis of the availability and restrictions of use foreseen by the regulations of the individual museums.
Legend
ed.: edition
s.d.: undated
s.t.: untitled