What’s the power of a digital invasion for a cultural heritage institution?
The digital invasion is going into the museum and sharing a storytelling experience - taking pictures and videos that create a story and sharing our individual emotions and feelings about the museum. For example, if that’s a museum in my city that I know very well - I can’t tell the whole history of the museum, but I can tell people my story with the museum. The whole story gets told via social media - Instagram Stories, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat - everything. Before and after the invasion, we post information on blogs to prepare people and spread the word about the initiative. We want to create the highest level of participation across different groups: young people, teenagers, adults and seniors.
The first year many museums were like, ‘No, no… I don’t like the word “invasion”, I don’t want you to invade us… to destroy anything!’ And a lot of museums thought that people were just going to go to the museums to take selfies... Others thought, ‘We’ve worked like this for ages, why do we have to change now?’ But after a little while, even very big museums invited us to organise digital invasions. They understood they should do something different to engage more people. For example we’ve collaborated with Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, the Reggia di Caserta and the Venaria Reale in Turin just to name a few. After the first year, we also went outside the Italian borders - we’ve had invasions in Germany, France, Australia, America and Brazil.
There’s always a ‘Chief Invader’ or supervisor who coordinates and leads the invasion. Sometimes it’s the museum that organises the digital invasion, or sometimes it’s someone from outside - in that case we contact the museum and ask them if they agree to be ‘invaded’. Then together with us, the Chief Invader creates a theme for the invasion. For example, the Madre Museum in Naples created the ‘Yellow Invasion’: the theme was to spot all the masterpieces in the museum related to the colour yellow.
What would be your top tip(s) for anyone thinking of using this kind of digital storytelling approach?
First of all, they have to understand that we are moving towards a model in which knowledge is no longer transmitted in one direction - it’s co-created. As Jim Richardson said…. we’re not talking about an audience, we’re talking about participants. This is the starting point. So to create a digital invasion, cultural sites have to keep in mind that they have to do something for people, with them. Not just promote their location. The main goal is to engage people, so they have to create something that’s different from the things that they do every day. A particular tour that has a story, like a fil rouge that people can interact with and feel a part of. So not just ‘this is the statue of blah, blah, blah…’ it’s not that kind of tour. And it’s different for every museum.
For example at the Museum of Cinema in Turin, we had a nighttime invasion - an invasion taking place at night with the staff dressed up as characters from the movies, sharing information about the museum as if they were that character. The most successful ones are when the museums are completely involved. Invasions can be anything - museums just have to think about things that they don’t do every day.
Since people are posting on all different platforms, how does all the output of an invasion connect since it doesn’t ‘live’ in one central place?
We ask people to have or activate at least one social profile to be able to post all the pictures and videos. We use our general hashtag - #InvasioniDigitali - and then we ask the Chief Invader to choose a particular hashtag for the invasion, for example the one I mentioned - the #YellowInvasion. Every time the invaders post, the stream grows with all the pictures and videos, and you can follow the invasion by following the hashtag. The museum also uses its social profiles to share and amplify the content that people post online in real time, and also later after the invasion. The most important thing is that the invasion isn’t just an event that happens at a certain date and time and then stops. It should be the starting point of something different.