From 14thto 17thDecember the Pino Pascali Foundation hosted an online residence for the creation museum merchandising products within the project “Monet – culture in motion in Adriatic NETwork of Museum” financed by the INTERREG IPA CBC Italy- Albania- Montenegro 2014/2020 Programme. The European project was created with the principle aim of creating a web of exchanges between the museums in the Adriatic area. MONET saw 16 artists take part, 4 from each geographical area (Albania, Molise, Apuglia, Montenegro), selected by means of public announcement to project museum merchandising objects intended for the 10 museums in the MONET network.

The museums selected for Apulia are: the Ribezzo archeological museum in Brindisi, the Castromediano museum in Lecce, the Foggia Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art and the Pino Pascali Foundation in Polignano a Mare.

Originally, the project foresaw the organization of a series of artistic residences to be realized in a public space. Considering the Covid 19 measures, the context of action on which the original project wanted to intervene was reconfigured. The conversion to an online residence project has confirmed the goal of promoting processes of professional growth able to stimulate and favour courses of artistic, virtuous, innovative and stimulating research.

The artists, Nicola Macolino (Molise), Irena Rakcevic (Montenegro),  Xhon Nikaj (Albania) and Carmelina Bracco (Apuglia) selected for the artistic residences organized by the Pino Pascali Foundation, have participated together with the other artists in the theory lessons organized  for the morning of 14thand 15thDecember.

The main argument was the museum management linked to the major exhibitions, but above all, the development of integrated services for the museum, first and foremost the merchandising for the bookshop, a tendency in the British speaking countries that is a source of increase for the takings of the exhibition spaces with examples such as MET and MoMa for the U.S. and Tate and V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum9 for the U.K.

In the first two days Thomas Clement Salomon and Diego Giacomelli of Mondo Mostre, an Italian organization that follows modern and contemporary art exhibitions throughout the world, contributed with their talks. In the first meeting, Thomas Clement Salomon talked about  the organizational work of major exhibitions  with a final exposition on the history of museum merchandising. On the second day, Diego Giacomelli  gave a talk on the strategic importance of merchandising both for the purpose of creating financial income and for greater visibility and branding of the museum.

For the entire four days there have been workshops to develop the merchandising projects. The selected artists were supported by a tutor (Mariapaola Spinelli for the Pascali Foundation) that followed the entire process of the creation of the projects and accompanied the artists in the virtual tours (edited by Santa Nastro) of the Apulian museums organized by the Pino Pascali Foundation. The curator,Antonio Frugis of the Pascali Foundation intervened in the workshops together with Gabriella Berardi, director of the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Foggia.

Furthermore, the tutor held a lesson on the cultural and creative industries that are among the priorities of development in the agenda of 2021 – 2027  of the E.U. The lesson was based on the analysis of Pier Luigi Sacco, a major expert of the argument.

During the artistic residence, the group of four artists realized 5 graphic projects of merchandising products for each of the 4 Apuglian museums involved in the activity, that is a total of 2, in accordance with the vision and the needs of each participating museum. The merchandising projects are as innovative and original as possible and represent the result of artistic – cultural collaboration created in the exchanges. The Graphic projects will be gathered in a single catalogue that will include a description of the merchandising product, graphic design and indexes that describe the product. The catalogue will be published on the web platform of the product network.