Survival strategies for cultural institutions: making space and open licenses

I present two strategies that could contribute to the current and future survival of cultural institutions: making space and open licences. Cultural institutions have the ability to “make space”: creating it, inventing it, transforming it, proposing alternatives to other places, conserving and giving access to extraordinary and unpredictable sites. In our current predicament, with our mobility reduced and rationed, the key is to reflect not on the space that the institutions have created, but on the sense of their space. It is not simply a question of re-opening what has been closed but of finding new ways to reproduce the profound sense of what institutions do through their places. Cultural institutions can redefine their space also through open licenses. A simple way to understand how licences work is to think of the contents of cultural institutions as something unmovable, which licences help to turn into something that can move from one place to another. Thanks to open licenses, the material of cultural institutions can be copied, used, distributed, combined and modified (which is what open licences authorise), with a determinant impact on the very idea of “public”. The public needs to be rethought of, not only as visitors to an exhibition or a website, but also as those who safeguard and enhance the value of their heritage and benefit from it, use it, transform it, re-elaborate it to create social and economic innovation.