Language is never neutral.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
– MAY 2025, FLORENCE
In 2018 we came up with a project involving people with a migratory background (back then we called them “migrants”) in heritage education activities (back then we spoke of “museum education”), so that they could become mediators (back then we called them “guides”) for foreign communities (today we know that most of our audience is Italian or European).
The project is called AMIR:
A for Accoglienza (Welcoming / Accoglienza [IT])
M for Musei (Museums)
I for Inclusione (Inclusion)
R for Relazione (Relationship)
After almost seven years of shifts in perspective, new stances, and different narratives, in May 2025 the time came to change our name—or rather, to give our name a new meaning.
No more welcoming, no more inclusion.
So we launched a call to look for new words to say who we are, in any language.
We asked for help in finding a word for the A and the I which, after years of collective work, reflection, exchanges, and sometimes even heated discussions, had begun to make us uncomfortable because they sound condescending and paternalistic, revealing the past without illuminating the future.
– JUNE 2025
Openness, emancipation, angalia (which in Swahili means “to observe carefully”), but also interdependence, interaction, interweaving, avant-garde: these are some of the proposals that emerged from the public survey launched to gather new words capable of conveying the meaning of the path we have taken together over these years.
122 proposals, with more than 100 people involved in two months.
From June 2025 until the next transformation, AMIR will stand for:
ALLIANCES MUSEUMS ENCOUNTERS (/INCONTRI [IT]) RELATIONSHIPS
Alliances, as a necessary choice in the practices shared among museums, mediators, specialists, researchers, activists, and audiences. Alliances that recognize the role of cultural heritage as a place where rhetoric and propaganda can be dismantled, a polyphonic space in which to inhabit complexity and shed light on conflicts. Alliances to feel co-responsible for the processes of social justice that shape our societies.
Encounters, because knowledge, understanding, and relationships inevitably begin with openness to meeting other subjectivities, other cultures, other perspectives, other narratives — and because, after all, throughout these years it is a word we kept stumbling upon again and again.
Some have already chosen to continue using the word “welcome”, because they felt welcomed — and only within that gaze did they feel recognized. For others, the word “inclusion,” even if it may sound paternalistic, still expresses something that is difficult not to desire.
Almost always, the process matters more than the outcome and “life is the art of encounter.” — Vinicius de Moraes
After choosing together the new words for the AMIR project acronym, we then created — together with Weird Studio — the AMIR manifesto.
It was an open moment for everyone: mediators, friends, travel companions, supporters, the audiences who have followed us for years, and our collaborators.
By printing on paper, symbolically, we gave shape to the time we have spent: years of collective work, reflections, discussions — sometimes even heated ones.
The workshop opened with a brief theoretical introduction on the history of printing and its techniques. Afterwards, each participant created their own print using the selected movable type, contributing to the making of a collective artwork.
The initiative was part of the Uncomfortable Tours programme: a project by Stazione Utopia, within the AMIR project, carried out with the support of Estate Fiorentina 2025, proposed within the Operational Plan of the City of Florence.
