by Loretta Secchi.
In Nova Gorica, European Capital of Culture 2025, the temporary exhibition marks an important and innovative milestone about initiatives focused on the accessibility to artistic heritage aimed at people with visual or more extensively sensorial impairments. The event represents a decisive, and not obvious,
milestone for Italian and European museology. It is focused on the themes of inclusion, testifying to the need of creating tools for approaching the arts and aesthetic education, attentive to the educational methodologies underlying typhlology and typhlo-didactic tools.
The value of an original artwork, but also of a copy, reproduction, transposition or translation of a masterpiece, is not presumed, it is substantial for blind and partially sighted people. These people, otherwise excluded from the real knowledge of cultural and artistic heritage, must be allowed learning art
and history with a function that is not only cognitive, but rather based on the interdisciplinarity that every humanistic knowledge imposes. It is therefore needed to set up a taxonomic aesthetic education aimed at categorizing its multiform expressions throughout the centuries, in consideration of a history of style that is the history of ideas, often metaphor and history of the spirit.
The criteria of proportion, the systems of measurement and representation of space and time, the compositional logics in search of balance and harmony, just to mention some aspirations specific to the universe of the arts, are inserted in this cosmos. The aim and function of art is to vivify, in the individual, the projective force of the human intellect associating it with the development of sensitivity, in feeling and understanding the meaning of the representations with aesthetic value.
And therefore, for the need to represent and project one’s imagination, and reify it, the human being finds reason and sharing of aesthetic and ethical models. The comparison with the principles of verisimilitude and abstraction, naturalism and stylization, realism and idealism, iconism and aniconism, develops the awareness of a grammar of forms to be approached with never mechanistic critical study
and practice of the languages of art.
For this reason, in Nova Gorica, the temporary exhibition constitutes a unique opportunity never conceived before: the possibility of highlighting a deliberately structured cognitive and learning path, through an exhibition of images of art and methodologies of historical-artistic research which also has the merit of combining two key institutions of functional aesthetic education: the Omero State Tactile
Museum of Ancona and the Anteros Tactile Museum of the Francesco Cavazza Institute for the Blind of Bologna: institutions of educational practice that are fundamental for blind people and for this reason unavoidable for everyone.