Mobility Expo

On the 2nd of December, during the celebration of the third anniversary of our Museum of Geography, the first virtual exhibition of the museum, “Travelling maps”, was launched. The virtual exhibition is based on a series of old atlases, maps, and guide books collected by Armando Morbiato during his travels around the globe and generously donated to our Museum. First released as a temporary exhibition of 9 maps and books (the oldest dating back to 1493) hosted at the Sala della Musica one year ago, in occasion of the presentation of the book by Morbiato, L’incanto del viaggiatore, the exhibition is now available in a virtual and enriched version on the online Library System of the University of Padua at https://mostre.cab.unipd.it/travelling-maps/.
Inspired by a mobility-based approach, the virtual exhibition starts with an introduction to the relationship between maps and mobilities; it continues by presenting the donor’s own biographical mobilities, through a series of quotes from Morbiato’s travel diaries and an interview carried out at his deposit on occasion of the first donation. The exhibition further includes an interactive map of the travels made by the featured maps across the past centuries before arriving at our Museum together with a series of beautiful scanned images of the old maps and ancient atlases now preserved at the Museum. The exhibition also provides a close reading of a series of Ex Libris through which the virtual visitor experiences the routes travelled by such fascinating cartographic objects.
An English version of the exhibition will be available soon, to allow our maps and atlases to continue their digital travels beyond the Museum’s walls!

Special Art & Mobility event at T²M 20th annual conference

Hosted by the MUSEUM OF GEOGRAPHY

21 Sept 2022

Increasingly, transport and mobility studies have been experimenting with the potential of art and creative methodologies in the study, imagination and expression of mobility issues.

The Art & Mobility event explores the growing exchange between transport and mobility research and art-based practices and methods, promoting a conversation between art practitioners, curators and mobility scholars. The event is inspired by key questions that sketch both the state of the art of this art-mobility dialogues, starting from empirical examples presented by invited artists and curators, and an initial future agenda.

What are the potentialities, limits and ethics of art-mobilities research? What is the relationship between public art and public transport? And how do public administrations sustain or not this exchange? What is the social impact of art-mobilities collaborations? What are the examples of transport and art collaborations that we should take in mind? How can we imagine our universities as entities that activate various kinds of mobilities? Which is the role of creative visuals and infographics in communicating the mobilities of our univer-cities to wider publics? How can artists and researchers collaborate around mobility topics and what is the role of artist-researchers in mediating this conversation?

This event will host the screening of an original video work with the presence of the artist, the official opening of the exhibitions Rabbits & Rails and Padua UniverCity with the curators, and guided tours of the Museum of Geography.

Opening address

Andrea Caracausi, Director of the MoHu Centre and Vice-Director of the DiSSGeA Department

Giada Peterle, Director of the Museum of Geography and co-curator of the Creative Commissions 2019

Participants

Aleksandra Ianchenko, artist and curator of the Mobile Exhibition Rabbits & Rails

Mauro Varotto, cultural geographers at the MoHu Centre and co-curator (with Tania Rossetto) of the exhibition Padova UniverCity

Paula Kaniewska, artist presenting the video work Incoming Call from Abstract Sculpture

21 September – 23 October, Sala della Musica,  Museum of Geography

Over its eight centuries of history, the University of Padua has shaped and enriched the urban fabric of the city. It has caused people to move by fostering regional, national and European mobility, built up collaboration networks, and stimulated exchanges of ideas at a global level. Through cartographic visuals and infographics, the Padua UniverCity. Geographies of a moving University exhibition invites you to discover the living and pulsating dimension of the University of Padua, its mighty growth and the spatial articulation of a university-city-world.

Over time, Padua has become a university city due to the desire of the University to permeate the urban space, which welcomed it from the very start. Through the exhibition and the related interactive Padua UniverCity web portal it is now possible to reconstruct the history and explore the geography of the physical expansion of the University into and beyond the city of Padua. The University is also made up of the mobile geographies of those who attend and have attended it over the centuries. The exhibition and the portal show the evolutionary trends in the number and provenance of students, technical-administrative staff and university teachers, based on available data from past centuries and with greater precision over the last thirty years. Since its origins, the University of Padua has been a meeting point for people of different backgrounds and cultures. In particular, the last century of its history reflects the cultural growth in society: until the early 20th century, attending university was a privilege reserved to just over 1,500 students. In the 2021-2022 academic year, the University had 69,240 enrollments, the highest peak in its eight centuries of history. The geography of the University of Padua is also made up of networks, relationships and exchanges, which now embrace the entire planet. Padua UniverCity shows also the international dimension of our university, the flows of students entering and leaving Padua with the Erasmus+ and Erasmus Mundus programs, the foreign universities with which the University of Padua has activated agreements and collaborations in the last fifty years, the invisible but growing network of web and social interactions.

21 September – 23 October, Sala degli Specchi, Museum of Geography

in collaboration with the project PUTSPACE

How often do you take a bus or a tram or use some form of public transport? Have you ever thought about why it is called public transport? And what makes it public? Is public transport a public space and how is it different from other places in the city which we use collectively?

Similar questions have been asked in the project Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting (PUTSPACE). The three-year project (2019-2022) has brought together academics and artists and this exhibition, curated by Aleksandra Ianchenko, is one outcome of their collaboration. The exhibition has two sections. The first, “Rabbits”, asks how different publics (users and providers, passengers and staff) interact with each other on public transport. The second, “Rails”, using the example of trams, asks what role public transport plays in peoples’ lives and in cities.

The exhibition comes in the shape of a vehicle, allowing you to make an imaginary journey, exploring stories from different European cities as well as in an online version in seven languages. Earlier exhibited at Les Halles Saint-Géry in Brussels (Belgium) and at the Estonian Road Museum in Varbuse (Estonia), on occasion of the T²M Conference, Rabbits & Rails will be hosted at the Museum of Geography from 21 September to 23 October.

Have a good journey!

Rabbits&Rails is the Mobile Exhibition of the Project Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting (PUTSPACE), which is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AKA, BMBF via DLRPT, ETAg, and the European Commission through Horizon 2020.

[map/cover image from: Appennini, 2022, Touring Club Italiano]

A conversation around the relationship between art, mobility and landscape storytelling with the artist Fabio Roncato and the curator Caterina Benvegnù (Progetto Giovani – Comune di Padova) on the 4th of February 2022. How does mobility impact the artistic research practice through the movement of materials and artworks, the encounter of people, curators, inhabitants and artists, and their bodily engagements? How does art contribute to landscape storytelling and our understanding of mobilities? To promote a dialogue between art, university research and education, and the city, the event is curated by the Museum of Geography in collaboration with the Progetto Giovani Office of the Municipality of Padua and hosted by the Laboratorio di Comunicazione Creativa e Landscape Storytelling of the Master Degree in Landscape Sciences (Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Scienze per il Paesaggio) of the University of Padua.

Cover photo credits: Daniele Marzorati

The event Il viaggiatore tra le mappe (The traveler among the maps) was held at the Museum of Geography on the 4th of Decemeber 2021 to celebrate the book launch of the L’incanto del viaggiatore: Diari (1957-1967) e ricordi di un emigrante (Il Poligrafo 2020) by Armando Morbiato. This was the occasion to discuss a series of topics related to mobility, like the circulation of objects, people, texts, and ideas through the trade of old atlases, maps, and guide books collected by Morbiato during his travels around the globe as an Italian migrant and merchant, but also to thank him and celebrate his generous donation to the Museum. The event was, indeed, the opportunity to realise a temporary exhibition titledTraveling maps at Palazzo Wollemborg (Sala della Musica) and to expose part of the precious objects that Morbiato donated to the Museum choosing from his private collection. The exhibition, which is going to turn into a permanent online exhibition, displayed 9 objects, among which maps and books, the oldest dating back to 1493.

Moving Knowledge/Mobility Expo is a Third Mission project coordinated by the Museum of Geography and sustained by an interdisciplinary board of members of the MoHuCentre. The project’s main goal is to circulate among a wider both academics and non-specialistic audience the reflections emerged through the interdisciplinary researches on mobility issues conducted at the DiSSGeA, within the Project of Excellence Mobility & Humanities and other projects, like Bo2022 and Padova Mobile UniverCity. Starting from the topicality of mobility issues in contemporary research and society, the project presents the Museum of Geography as a cultural hub and place of encounter between the University and the City, and promotes the dissemination of academic research through a strong dialogue between art and science, organising exhibitions, workshops, and events both online and in person.

Members: Giada Peterle (Scientific Coordinator), Elena Canadelli, Giovanni Donadelli, Francesco Ferrarese, Chiara Gallanti, Francesco Lubian, Federico Mazzini, Marco Orlandi, Chiara Rabbiosi, Tania Rossetto, Mauro Varotto