Taras e i doni del mare. Una mostra virtuale fra pandemia e ritorno alla normalità

The idea of a digital exhibition was conceived in November 2020 during the COVID-19 emergency to respond to the impossibility of hosting an exhibition in the museum spaces. Due to the technical time needed, the exhibition was inaugurated when the museums reopened to the public, and our lives went "back to normal". Notwithstanding, this normality does not always bring along ideal conditions. While the digital sphere has become pervasive in our lives in recent months, its role in Italian museums has become critical, both in terms of installations and contents. The exhibition design was already at an advanced stage when the uncertain and problematic situation led to a rethinking of the entire project. Although the physical set-up was preliminary, both the division into sections and the selection of objects had already been decided. However, the digital exhibition Fra terrae mare was specifically designed to provide a unique user experience that would endure even after visitors returned to the museum. The idea that guided the exhibition design process was simple: to abstract rather than virtualize. In other words, we wanted to avoid the simple transposition of a traditional exhibition into a digital environment, with a virtual tour simply reproducing visitors physical movements in the museum. Instead, we decided to use the digital language as a creative tool and exploit its ability to evoke and create an immaterial and parallel reality, abstract yet simple to enjoy. This new iteration of the project required combining the virtual objects with narrative elements, producing three-dimensional models of the artifacts on display and animated multimedia stories that could convey their function and history.