About

Museum in the Village: Art in Community

A project where art is the invitation to meetings and sharing!

Welcome to the Museum in the Village! In this artistic and social intervention project, focused on the elderly population in rural and isolated areas, 13 museums and 13 villages from 26 Portuguese municipalities come together in a large network. Communities interact with museum professionals, artists and local organisations to share their cultural heritage and revive traditions. Learn more about the Museum in the Village Project and join us for this unique experience!

Museum in the Village Project

The “Museum in the Village” project aims to offer a cultural programme to audiences who do not normally have the possibility to enjoy it, consisting of the creation of a sequential and integrated programme of visits between museums and villages, through a cohesive network between municipalities and their cultural and artistic offerings.

The Museum in the Village is an artistic and social intervention project that brings together Museums and Communities and is aimed at autonomous elderly people over 65 years of age, from the 26 municipalities of the Culture 2027 Network, who live in isolated rural environments with little accessibility to cultural offers.

This process culminates in the materialisation of a new work developed by the elderly, together with museum professionals and the SAMP team, which aims to represent both the individual characteristics of each elderly person and their community. The collective artwork is then inaugurated in the museums involved, through a SAMP Performative Presentation representing both the museum institution and the community.

Launching

Documentary

The documentary “Museu na Aldeia” presents the close relationships created between the museums and the villages over almost three years of the project. The transport and presentation of museum collections in villages far from urban centres provided numerous moments of encounters through cultural similarities and differences. The villages reciprocated the gesture by creating a new collective work and presenting it in their respective museums. In this film developed by Casota Collective, the relationships created through Cultural Heritage are recorded.

Villages and Museums

The Great Encounter

‘Grande Encontro Museu na Aldeia’ (The Great Encounter) brought together for the first time all the communities, museums, municipalities and partners in the same space to celebrate the several moments of the project. This special encounter took place at Teatro José Lúcio da Silva on the 1st of March 2023 and allowed the crossover of creations, the sharing of thoughts and the deepening of bonds between all.

Learn more

The People

The most precious Cultural Heritage of a territory!

In the “Museum in the Village” project, each community becomes a living museum, where the most precious asset is people. The faces of a territory reveal artists, storytellers, poets, writers and guardians of memories and their heritage, but above all, they present us with the knowledge of being with the other.

Awards

Prizes and distinctions awarded to the Museum in the Village project

Over the course of its trajectory, the Museum in the Village project has received numerous distinctions and prestigious recognitions at both the national and international levels. These recognitions underscore the significance of the initiative as an inspiring example of cultural engagement and commitment between museums and communities in the preservation and appreciation of Cultural Heritage.

Learn more

Project Credits

SAMP

SAMP is an institution that has been celebrating people for more than 150 years, from the womb of their mothers to their last lap, always maintaining the ideal that “more important than putting musicians on stage, is putting music and art in people’s lives”.

SAMP – Sociedade Artística Musical dos Pousos – is a Public Utility Institution established in 1873. Its first chairman was the Baron of Viamonte, a prominent figure in national politics, belonging to the regenerative and progressive parties, and twice Civil Governor of the District of Leiria. With uninterrupted activity since its foundation, despite the crises caused by the World Wars and the emigrant streams, SAMP has played an important role at a regional level, and in some of its areas at a national and international level, either because of the significant number of professional artists who have emerged from it, or because of the innovation and quality of some of its programmes and projects.

Besides the Philharmonic Band, an historical body of the Institution, an Arts School with Official Music Teaching and various Choral and Instrumental Courses, SAMP develops – in partnership with various institutions and State bodies – a wide range of programmes in the areas of Training, Music Therapy and Expressive Therapies. From all SAMP’s activities, its Artistic Teaching project dedicated to early childhood should be emphasised, as it is a pioneer at a national level and a reference in some of its programmes, as well as the strong social intervention assumed by the various programmes it develops within the scope of the therapeutic effects of the Arts.

Partners

The Museum in the Village project is a collaborative initiative that relied on a constellation of partners and collaborators, more precisely museums, municipalities, parish councils, collectivities, associations and many others who contributed to creating synergies and ensuring the success of the project in a vast territory.

Cultural Promoter

Co-financier

Social investor

Partner

Collaborators