Introduction
Daniela Berta
Director
Museomontagna, Torino
Mario Montalcini
President
Museo Nazionale della Montagna
Here contemporary art and science are exploring the regenerating and transformative opportunities
that human beings derive from contact with nature, with a special regard for mountain contexts.
Conceived and developed by the Museo Nazionale della Montagna of Turin, where the show could be
visited between 2022 and 2023, a new version – updated and expanded in artistic and scientific
content – of The Mountain Touch is now being presented at MUSE, the Museo delle Scienze in
Trento.
At a time when daily life takes us ever further from natural environments, this project aims to
rekindle the dormant awareness of the inestimable value of our bond with nature and of the
possibilities for enjoying its beneficial effects, on both our physical and mental health, via
the simple act of traversing and staying in touch with mountains and their ecosystems.
A transdisciplinary outlook is essential for those museums and cultural institutions strongly
projected towards the great themes and urgent issues of the contemporary world; likewise, an
openness to research, innovation and different sensibilities: all things that this exhibition
has adopted as its work method with MUSE. Within this framework, the narrative path of The
Mountain Touch unfolds via a synergetic dialogue between humanist and scientific cultures,
aiming to contribute to the development of an increasingly aware ecological responsibility, in
line with the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and with the most recent
guidelines expressed by ICOM – International Council of Museums.
As part of the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of our institution, founded in 1874, and
of Museomontagna’s Sustainability Programme, which, since 2018 to today, has witnessed the
production of a dozen or so exhibitions staged both in the museum and elsewhere, as well as a
multitude of multifocal public projects and educational workshops, The Mountain Touch stands to
confirm the importance of investing in the languages of sustainability for the future. After the
success of Tree Time – staged at Museomontagna between 2019 and 2020 and at MUSE between 2020
and 2021 – this project reinforces the relationship between the two museums, confirming the need
to deal with the complex themes of our time within quality convergences and interdisciplinary
systems of cooperation.
Through twenty works by seventeen artists, accompanied by scientific texts by a dozen or so
researchers from different scientific fields, The Mountain Touch is a meeting point where art is
a vehicle for communicating complex scientific concepts and science provides new keys for
appreciating the artworks, thus providing tools to aid everyone in understanding, asking
questions, or processing ideas: in short, being part of the game. It is an invitation to take
part in an aesthetic, experiential and informative experience, but above all to actively take
part in the culture of sustainability and the development of a caring awareness.
In his book The Innocence of Objects, the Turkish Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk
includes a manifesto for museums in the hope that they will address our humanity, explore the
universe and the new, modern man, and measure success by their capacity to reveal the humanity
of individuals rather than by their ability to represent history or society. So, in the broader
ongoing process of rethinking the representative, descriptive and prescriptive museum paradigm,
The Mountain Touch moves in the direction of stimulating visions, feelings and sustainable
actions and designs a sphere of expression for the profound, ancestral feeling of being human.