The national “Person and Community” award went to the Casa della Musica of the Municipality of Parma, which for a decade has promoted the work of public administrations and volunteer organizations towards improving the quality of life and services offered to citizens. The exhibition ” Journey into the music of Miecio Horszowski” was chosen for the section of specific projects towards “Disability” and the recognition was awarded during the VIII National Conference “The centrality of the Person”.
Casa della Musica was awarded second place overall thanks to the communicative architecture of an exhibition which managed to enhance the different skills in the exhibition dedicated to the pianist Miecio Horszowski and which the Culture and Tourism Sector – SO Casa della Musica wanted to design in collaboration with ARTETIPI aps and Séfora Social enterprise ANffAS.
“This is a recognition that captures a convinced and sincere commitment to adding or making the city’s cultural offering acquire the advantage of accessibility” says the Deputy Mayor and Councilor for Culture and Tourism of the Municipality of Parma Lorenzo Lavagetto “it is an award that I believe deserves an exhibition imagined for everyone: from children to visitors who have reached the age of its protagonist, from expert scholars of the musical world to the simply curious, ready to be read by special people with the contribution of special boys and girls . Furthermore, it is an exhibition built thanks to the gift of personal memories that have been transformed into a historical-musical testimony that is now the heritage of the Parma community and, also for this reason, we wanted it to be the first exhibition in the city truly for everyone. It is an award that makes us proud and underlines a constructive path that we will continue to follow.”
Among the merits that allowed Miecio Horszowski’s exhibition to be selected are the fact that it is a cultural product spread through inclusive languages and expressive forms aimed at broadening the public and the reference target by promoting a culture of inclusion, in particular through the drafting of educational texts, written in an Easy to Read (Etr) language and pictograms in CAA (Augmentative Alternative Communication), creation of comic guides as a result of artistic workshops created by disabled artists, educational workshop proposals for schools and support centers to disabilities.
The exhibition Journey into the Music of Miecio Horszowski, in fact, tells the story and figure of the famous Polish pianist by experimenting with different communication channels at multiple levels to intercept heterogeneous audiences. There are two collateral projects designed to achieve this result: a comic guide to make the contents more accessible to children and teenagers, and an application that allows access to the route through highly readable texts, graphics and gaming.
The illustrated comic guide was created by the cartoonist illustrator Martina Sarriztu together with the artists with intellectual disabilities of the ARTETIPI association during a three-month workshop last spring. The application, however, with which it is possible to read the entire contents of the exhibition panels translated into easy-to-read language and in CAA, was created by Séfora Srl Impresa Sociale ANffAS, which has always shown particular attention to people with communication needs complex, which find in the use of enabling technologies and appropriate compensatory tools valid aids to encourage interaction with the environment and the possibility of approaching and enjoying cultural contents such as those present in the exhibition.
