WWhat is it
M.E.M.O.RI., Euro Mediterranean Museum of Rejected, Re(f)used Objects, is a travelling museum that exhibits fragments, traces, and small items collected during the journey made by those involved in the “il Salone dei Rifiutati” cooperative in 5 Mediterranean cities (Genoa, Marseille, Malaga, Tunis and Tétouan) and 5 cities in the Basilicata region (Bernalda, Venosa, Matera, Muro Lucano, and Potenza). The research has been carried out through a practice of creative crossings aimed at getting to know the places of the 10 communities involved, and discovering or reliving the urban space in search of artistic or domestic artifacts, souvenirs, local handicraft cast-offs, items retrieved from the sea or found in the street. The recovered objects have become the pretext for annotating gestures, meetings, influences, traditions and changes, chronicled in museums, homes, shops, artisanal workshops on the streets, and in the ports. Passing through, passing by, the research into artifacts and articles has opened up the various different collections, witnessing a shift of interest from the typical to the topical object. The ability to evoke the cultures to which they belong, their souvenirs, merges with the universality of incidental and everyday findings, travel memoirs, common objects, flight tickets, pocket items or objects found on the street with the goal of tracing, in respect of the original meaning of the word souvenir, the memory and its way of encountering reality by preserving and nurturing the past. The objects gathered during these journeys gave birth to the M.E.M.O.RI. collections, displayed in a permanent exhibition and several temporary exhibitions in a unique and interactive way. Retracing the stories contained within the objects, M.E.M.O.RI. is a path that attempts to offer elements for reflection on the relationship between man and man, opening up questions about the meaning of the cultures within which these things were born and were exchanged, handled, experienced. It is a veritable museum of circumstances, in which, behind every apparently simple object, a journey of the hand is hidden; the hand that touches something, brushing against it, taking it, leaving it, giving it away, in an attempt to give shape to portions of the world. In a time that often industrialises souvenirs, rendering them anonymous, the desire to find here a sense of uniqueness and authentic representation of a place, led us to decide to turn to the sense of souvenirs through the ancient concept of symbols. In ancient Greek the term symbol (σύμβολον) recalled the practice whereby two people, two families or even two cities, when greeting and parting, would break a tile, usually made from terracotta, or a ring, and each of them would keep one of the two parts, as a testimony of the encounter, of the agreement. The search for souvenirs, in this case, has become for us a tangible memory of exchanges, of debate, of dialogue between people. Far from providing answers on identity and culture, M.E.M.O.RI. proposed, in conclusion, a way of narrating and sharing the experience of travel; in this case a journey through Europe and the Mediterranean, where for thousands of years, also through the exchange of objects and goods, people have tried to find dialogical keys that may link and ensure mutual recognition.