City museums reach out to the elderly
The project “El museu més gran” gets under way, aimed at senior citizens from municipal spaces and centres for the elderly and designed to promote interest in artistic creation, stimulate conversation and foster social interaction among elderly people from a cultural perspective. The project will see sixty free workshops organised at fifteen city museums between now and December.
The workshops consist of four 2-hour sessions and use images and photographs from the different museums. The activities culminate with a collective creation by elderly people which will then be displayed at one of the participating museums.
Each group will carry out an observation exercise and make a joint selection of twelve images, in a process with help from experts so that the final selection is significant for the group as a whole. Once the images are chosen, participants will take a copy home, where they should take a photo with a digital device and seek a dialogue with the image chosen from the collection. The generation of a new photo in their everyday surroundings at home should lead to parallels and dialogues between the images from museums and the new images created.
The idea is to foster knowledge and facilitate elderly people’s enjoyment of museums, as it has been shown that participation in these spaces generates physical and emotional well-being and encourages healthy socialisation.
The participating museums are: the Recinte Modernista de Sant Pau, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, the Museu d’Història de Catalunya, the Museu Marítim de Barcelona, the Museu Frederic Marès, the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya, the Fundació Joan Miró, the Fundació Tàpies, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Museu Olímpic de Barcelona, the Museu del Disseny, the Fundació Suñol, the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món, the Monestir de Pedralbes and the Arts Santa Mònica.
