Accessible culture
For Matera 2019, investing in accessible culture means investing in the community, in the creative potential of collectivity, in the genius loci, in the community’s trust capital. The intensification of recession cycles and depopulation tend to weaken faith in culture. Matera 2019 seeks to reverse this cliché in the belief that cultural participation is a first step towards the strategic involvement of citizens in decision-making processes. Accessible culture viewed as a driver for civic renewal.
How many people participated in the events of Matera 2019?
- Total number of visitors
- Visitors per typology
A passport for everyone
The Matera 2019 Passport was the product of an experimental policy that sought to bring cultural enjoyment to categories of citizens who are usually left out. At the same time, the Passport was a symbol of temporary citizenship: the Passport of the Temporary Citizen leads its holder out of the imperative logic of cultural consumption, an ingredient of mass tourism that is unsustainable for the host communities, to embrace the more sustainable collective imagination of temporary communities. Matera 2019 offered cultural citizenship as an alternative to “quick-trip” tourism, an honorary title for everyone intending to become part of the community, to share in its successes and failures but above all to respect its pace of life and sense of time.
Basilicata, a network of relations
The dense network of connections shown in the map is the graphic representation of the exchanges between people fostered by Matera 2019 at the regional level. The networks are made of many nodes, some smaller others larger, and each node is, in its own way and measure, both centre and periphery. The shockwave of the European Capital of Culture promoted a culturally polycentric fabric, in which the cultural cross-fertilization spread out all the way to the most isolated dimensions
, and triggered a social and cultural experiment.
No person left behind
Accessible culture meant encouraging and developing projects for all the categories and communities often left at the margins of development processes: people with disabilities, as well as migrants, ethnic and linguistic minorities, LGBT communities, hospitalized citizens, inmates.
Accessibility and participation are thus condensed in the tools that qualify every social category to become directly involved in the processes of creation and implementation.
Open data corner
At the centre of this platform, the data, now published in an open format. The Matera 2019 datasets are thus transformed into a digital commons that can inform, inspire and support new information and design practices for the local, national or international communities.
Below, you can download both the raw data related to the theme of this section and the aggregated data used for each of the above visualizations. You can also find more data in the site’s Open Data Center, which contains all the data available in the platform, or in our GitHub repo.
