Agrocenturiato’s and Postumia’s Lands.

You do not have to venerate your family, you do not have to venerate your country, you do not have to venerate the place where you live, but you have to know that you have them, you must know that you are part of them.

(American Pastoral)

WHAT IS AN ECOMUSEUM

The term Ecomuseo was coined by Hugues de Varine in 1971.
With this term he wanted to refer to a museum dedicated to the territory as a whole:
Something that represents what a territory is, and what its inhabitants are, starting from the living culture of people, from their environment, from what they have inherited from the past, from what they love and wish to show to their guests and pass on to their children.
The experience of the ecomuseums was born in France at the beginning of the 70s, thanks to the intuition of the museologist Georges Henri Riviére, who described them as follows:
The ecomuseum is the museum of time and space in a given territory, is an institution that deals with studying, preserving, enhancing and presenting the collective memory of a community and the territory that hosts it, outlining consistent lines for the development future, it is the fruit of the constructive relationship between a population, its administration and a multidisciplinary team of experts, it is a body that, while also addressing an external public, has as main interlocutors the inhabitants of the community who, instead of passive visitors, they want to become active users, it is a museum of the time, where knowledge extends and branches through the past lived by the community to arrive in the present, with an opening on the future, it is a museum of space: significant places to stop and walk.
It privileges the direct visual language of physical objects and images, in their original context and in their exposure to the public (taken from the site “ecomusei del trentino”)

First spread in France (where there is a federation of ecomuseums) and in other French-speaking countries such as Canada, then tested in many other European countries and in different territorial situations, such as neighboring areas or including natural parks, abandoned paleo-industrial areas, valleys left marginalized by mass tourism development, since the 90s are emerging on the Italian scene as one of the most innovative forms in the difficult conjugation of conservation and development, culture and environment, local identity and tourism.

A territory, a population, a heritage.

These are therefore the three fundamental components of every ecomuseum, which simultaneously constitute its substance, content and working method.

1) The territory ,because the ecomuseum is not a building or a place, but it is diffused to the whole space, representing and making more visible its characteristics such as the landscape, the history, the memory, the identity.

2) The population, because it is the true subject-object of the Ecomuseum, because only its participation legitimizes its existence, because it is the succession of communities and populations in space and time that has created the landscape and heritage of a territory.

3) The heritage, because all the assets of the material culture (buildings, artifacts, works …) and the immaterial (knowledge, tastes, stories, traditions, trades, habits, …) is what the Ecomuseum intends to enhance, constitutes the identity of the territory and its community.

“The relationship with the population does not allow for discussions: it is the participation of the population that legitimizes the Ecomuseum. Participation, collaboration, competition, association, complicity, connivance, trust …: the search for close relations with the population is important, but also important how many subtly different forms this participation can take.” (Gèrard Collin, Ecomuseum of the ont Lozère) – (content taken from the website www.ecomuseovaltaleggio.it)