Public Engagement 2023-25

On 5 February 2025 the Museum of Geography hosted a thought-provoking exhibition event curated by Chiara Rabbiosi and Ginevra Montefusco, featuring installations created by students of our Master’s degree programmes in Local Development and Mobility Studies in synergy with the  “Food communities: ecocultural approaches and postdevelopment perspective”, Next Generation EU, M4 PRIN PNRR P20223SFMN project.

The exhibits and related students’ presentations offered a fresh take on the interconnections between food systems, mobility, and development through innovative and creative lenses. Attendees were immersed in a multisensory experience that challenged conventional perspectives and sparked dialogue.

Kudos to these bright young minds whose works demonstrated a deep understanding of such critical issues and a commitment to experiment with creative methodologies and active learning initiatives around mobilities!

On January 14, 2025 the Museum of Geography at the University of Padua, one of our main partners of social engagement activities, inaugurated a new exhibition titled The World in Hand. Travel Guides in the West from the Modern Age to Today. The exhibition, which is curated by Gian Paolo Chiari and Sara Dotto with the scientific direction of Giada Peterle, Chiara Rabbiosi and Giovanni Donadelli, remained open until March 11, offering a unique look at the evolution of travel guides from the 17th century to the present day. Among the 40 volumes on display, visitors can admire rarities such as the first guide of the Italian Cycling Touring Club from 1895 and the first Lonely Planet from 1973. Created with the contribution of the Library of Geography of the University of Padua and the MoHu Centre, the exhibition is sponsored by the Italian Touring Club. The exhibition was accompanied by a dedicated book and several collateral events.

Our Landscape Videomaking laboratory, based at MobiLab, continues its collaboration with Euganea Film Festival, which is now an important stakeholder of the MA in Landscape Studies. 

This year, the short documentary videos created by our students were presented at the Festival on 13 September in the Euganean Hills. The Laboratory involves the students of our MA in Landscape Studies under the supervision of Mauro Varotto, Marco Toffanin and Michele Trentini. 

The works presented are: Vigneti chiusi. Vivere con i cinghiali nei Colli Euganei by Silvia Schiavon (IT, 10′); Ungheria libera. Un quartiere a Casale sul Sile by Mariano D’Innocenzo (IT, 9′); Ciamàs per nòm. Conoscersi per nome by Carolina Rossi (IT, 12′); San Bellino patrono del fotovoltaico by Francesco Finotto (IT, 6′).

The open seminar LA CITTÀ CAMMINATA: PRATICHE DI ATTIVISMO URBANO was organised by MoHu and the Museum of Geography to involve the students of our MA in Landscape Studies as well as the general public interested in practices of care for the city. The public seminar was co-organised with the PRIN PNRR project WALC – Walking Landscapes of Urban Cultures as part of the NaMUC – Narrative Mobilities of Urban Cultures seminar series.

The event was held to present Beatrice Barzaghi and Maria Fiano’s “Guida alla Venezia ribelle” (Voland, 2015). During the meeting, the authors shared thought-provoking reflections and narratives, drawing on Venice’s memories of rebellion and introducing the contemporary awareness-raising activities of OCIO –  the civic observatory for housing issues and residentiality.

In their words, walking the city emerges as a practice of care that local activists perform to subvert the stereotypes portraying Venice only as a tourist destination while consolidating the reciprocal connections between resident communities and their urban space.

We enjoyed having Beatrice Barzaghi and Maria Fiano and deeply appreciated the ways in which they walked us through memories of rebellion to inspire our contemporary claim for an aware right to the city.

Notturni Contemporanei. Un’esplorazione geoletteraria dei nightscapes veneziani is part of the geoliterary walks series CONTESTI organised by the Museum of Geography of the University of Padua. Notturni Contemporanei, as part of the NaMUC seminar series, also contributed to the public engagement activities promoted by the MoHu-based Unit of the PRIN PNRR research project WALC – Walking Landscapes of Urban Cultures.

Fostering the process of attunement to the atmospheres of the local urban night, the open-air seminar, organised by Giada Peterle and Giuseppe Tomasella, engaged participants in a night walk through the winter city, drawing on a selection of works by contemporary authors living in, walking through and writing about Venice. Their literary representations revealed experiences, practices and realities co-producing the nightscapes of those people considering the city as their birthplace, home or safe harbour.

Strolling along the calli, the texts invited non-academic participants (25 attendees of different ages and backgrounds) to steer away from the stereotypes and clichés of Venice’s iconography. The geoliterary exploration of local nightscapes, in fact, offered renewed understandings of the entwined relations connecting the excesses of the tourism phenomenon with the decline of residential communities. The night walk was a chance to disclose the ‘glocal’ features of the rising fears related to the consequences of the climate crisis looming over Venice.

The seminar Chinese Memories. Comics and Maps of a Migratory Journey to the West was organised by MoHu and the Museum of Geography to involve the students of our MA in Mobility Studies, but also extra-academic publics, in a creative dissemination project about mobilities. The seminar is co-organised with the PRIN PNRR project WALC – Walking Landscapes of Urban Cultures as part of the NaMUC – Narrative Mobilities of Urban Cultures seminar series curated by Giada Peterle.

The seminar, in fact, was held to launch the graphic novel “Memories. Notes and Maps of a Journey to the West” co-authored by Ciaj Rocchi, Matteo Demonte and Daniele Brigadoi Cologna (Cleup, 2023). Here, the artists and authors retrace the mobility of people, goods and ideas from the West to early twentieth-century Europe through the combination of comics, maps and archival research. 

Through their previous graphic novels, “Primavere  e autunni” and “Chinamen” (BeccoGiallo 2015 and 2017), Rocchi and Demonte had already contributed to the re-writing of the history of Chinese migration to Northern Italy and Milan: with their new work, “Memories”, they expand the spatio-temporal frame of their creative and historical research, in collaboration with sinologist Brigadoi Cologna. 

As Giada Peterle and Tania Rossetto write in their afterword, this graphic novel is one of the unexpected surprises emerging from the “Variations on Mobility” programme. “Variations on Mobility” was the joint edition of Creative Commissions 2019/2020 hosted by the MoHu and the Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities. The idea at the basis of the Creative Commissions scheme was that collaboration between academic researchers and artists within the same commission is particularly apt to move knowledge outside the academy through the adoption of creative forms of expression. “Memories” represents an extended version of the initial project realised by the team composed of Brigadoi Cologna, Rocchi and Demonte, as part of the path of their creative work initiated during the Creative Commissions.

The Dissgea department and MoHu Centre supported this path and are now happy to launch the result of such art-research collaboration inspired by the mobility humanities frame.

The seminar, thus, brought together not only the mobility of goods, people, and objects, economic history and history of migratory flows, but also a broader reflection on the role of artists and the use of creative languages such as comics in mobility research.

We enjoyed having with us Ciaj Rocchi and Matteo Demonte and deeply appreciated the ways in which they put mobility at the centre of a productive dialogue between creative work, academic knowledge and public engagement!