Altri Sguardi: deconstructing the museum through new perspectives

At Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, the Altri Sguardi project transforms the museum into a space for dialogue and participation, where refugees and migrants become interpreters of the artworks, offering multiple perspectives that challenge dominant viewpoints and enrich the narrative.

Altri Sguardi is the cultural exchange workshop that Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana dedicates each year to refugees, asylum seekers, and participants with a migration background. Launched in 2019, the project is founded on a gesture often considered radical: reversing the perspective.

Participants in Altri Sguardi observe, interpret, and mediate artworks, offering visitors a new and plural narrative of the exhibitions at the Venetian venues of the Pinault Collection. Their personal experiences challenge the apparent neutrality of the museum gaze. Indeed, the museum is never a neutral space: it is traversed by visions, hierarchies, and cultural categories that often reflect a consolidated Eurocentric and Western perspective. Altri Sguardi thus functions as an exercise in deconstructing this “dominant gaze,” opening up a space where voices that are usually marginalized gain legitimacy, visibility, and an audience.

The program unfolds through a series of guided sessions led by mediation staff and tutors, often former participants of the workshop, during which the group visits the exhibitions, discusses the artworks, and develops new interpretive pathways. Edition after edition, the project evolves together with its participants, adapting to their needs and the insights that emerge throughout the experience.

The museum is fully transformed into a space of openness and dialogue, where the plurality of individual stories problematizes and enriches the institutional narrative. The artworks thus become a ground for discussion on urgent contemporary issues such as social and cultural inclusion, the role of language, and the complexities of representation.

More than a mere educational project, Altri Sguardi is a critical device: a way to interrogate the museum and its exhibitions, redefine its practices, and imagine new forms of engagement.

Editions of Altri Sguardi:

Altri Sguardi: deconstructing the museum through new perspectives

Altri Sguardi: deconstructing the museum through new perspectives

Search