VVV. VerboVisualeVirtuale
The project
"VerboVisuale Virtuale" is a web platform dedicated to the discovery and study of verbo-visual research documented in the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura, a key component of the Collections held at Mart in Rovereto and Museion Bolzano.
The project was launched in 2013 from a collaboration between Mart and Museion, as well as the Digital Humanities group of FBK (Bruno Kessler Foundation) in Trento. It's funded by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto.
In 2020 the "Connections manent" project, funded by Fondazione Caritro, kicked off a new phase of implementation of the VVV platform in collaboration with the University of Trento.
The Archivio di Nuova Scrittura (ANS)
The ANS is a cultural association founded in 1988 in Milan by collector Paolo Della Grazia; it preserves a vast collection of artworks, books and documents on any artistic expression bringing words and images together.
During the 1990s it became the main Italian research centre on verbo-visual art, promoting exhibitions, conferences and publications.
The Archivio di Nuova Scrittura was first deposited at the Mart and Museion in 1998, and permanently donated to the two museums between 2019 and 2020. The collection includes thousands of works by international artists, while the library holds a number of priceless artist books and hundreds of Futurist first editions. Equally impressive is the archival material, which includes the ANS fund and the Fraccaro-Carrega fund, and features a wealth of documents that are almost works of art themselves.
The digital platform
The web portal combines in a single catalogue the databases of the two museums, reassembling the collection in a new, virtual space that is easily accessible and searchable.
Each file is complemented by an image that can be explored in detail. For a number of artists that represent the collection, a digital archive of books, documents and multimedia materials is also available; this is set to grow over time as the project develops.
The wealth of these holdings, including countless interconnections between artists, works and documents, can be visualised in an interactive format based on the 'network analysis' model, which enables exploration of the data from a different angle.