RAAM – Ricerca Archivio AMACI Musei

Online catalog of the heritage and public collections of AMACI associated museums

Created by the General Directorate of Contemporary Art and Architecture and Outlying Urban Areas of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism and by AMACI – Associazione dei Musei d’Arte Contemporanea Italiani, RAAM – Ricerca Archivio AMACI Musei is an online archive designed to raise awareness of the quantity and quality of public contemporary art heritage, from 1966 to the present day, of the 21 museums that are members of AMACI. The project responds to the need for accessibility and promotion of the public heritage of contemporary art, through means in line with the international standards and today’s tools of fruition, in which the digital world is seen as the ideal means by which to satisfy the need for sharing.

Promotion, valorisation and awareness-raising of contemporary art are thus ever more deeply bound up in the concept of free and rapid accessibility to imagery and information on the works of our national public heritage.

The uniqueness of the project lies in the possibility to bring together the works of 22 museums in a single tool thanks to the coordination of the AMACI network, thus on one hand guaranteeing a census and overview of the heritage represented by sum of the collections of member museums, and on the other, the online presentation of the single works accompanied with available images.

RAAM is an archive in progress, constantly updated and integrated with new records from the museums that contribute to the increase in the public heritage, each in keeping with their own purchasing policies. Within the website, advanced searches may be carried out, and info sheets may be viewed on each artwork, along with information and images concerning the artist, the work and the museum or institution where it is housed.

RAAM is not just a useful search tool, but it is also a system that allows users – whether they are professionals from the sector, scholars, museum-goers or mere internauts – to get an idea of the quality, consistency and distribution of the public heritage of contemporary art: the various search filters and the different possible combinations of the orderings of the lists thus facilitate an overall analysis of the heritage from a chronological, museographical, typological etc. point of view. To this end, with pages dedicated to the results of cross-searches, to the single institutions by which a given catalogue is published, with various types of ordering and a brief description of the museum, and with pages dedicated to each artist, RAAM allows for the viewing of parts of the corpus of works to be found in a range of museum collections.