Across the doorway: developing post-critical museology from a closed university museum

The Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin (MAET) has been closed to the public since 1984. Recently, it implemented reflections on its social and political role by undertaking participatory practices and audience engagement/development projects. This chapter analyses two initiatives and their underlying theoretical framework. The first, A Piece About Us (2015), involved youths and second-generation migrants creating new cultural products (videos, performances, etc.) and the Turin Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) community was moreover engaged in the creation of theatrical and visual performances. The second project presented is the exhibit Gelede. Our Yoruba Mothers (2018). This exhibition was designed in collaboration with diaspora groups that reframed cultural heritage through the subjects' emic points of view. The two case studies presented involved different audiences and led the subjects involved to discover MAET's cultural heritage. They are part of wider reflections on MAET collections through a contemporary gaze and according to a post-critical museology approach. In this sense, they emerge as possible ways to cross the doorway that divides the museum and its potential audience and, in a wider perspective, its society.