“The European Museum Academy is partner in a new research project under the European Union programme Horizon Europe. META – MUSEUM stands for “Moving Emotions towards confidence in the Transformative Appropriation for a Meaningful Understanding of cultural heritage: a neuroScientific approach to European Museums”.

The transformative nature of cultural heritage implies it is constantly changing, not so much as an object but as a bearer of values and meanings that are interpreted differently, over time, by society.  Cultural heritage is therefore transformed by the interpretation that society makes of it, and vice versa society and individuals are transformed by it.

Based on these assumptions, META-MUSEUM is very ambitious because it wants to scientifically measure (via Neuroscience’s method) emotional reactions to a cultural experience, and in particular the state of confidence and resilience, getting the means to design cultural experiences able to increase them in citizens, focusing on three basic concepts:“confidence”, “resilience”, “empathy”. The project aims to develop new skills (related to a “TransforMeans theory” in neuroscience that can be defined as “empathic cultural mediation”) to design cultural experiences.

The project is coordinated by the university in Turin (Politecnico di Torino) and we are all in all ten partners who are mostly universities around Europe. The project is planned to run for 36 months. The European Museum Academy will primarily be engaged in developing an educational module and general communication and dissemination.

The project has in December 2024 finalised the first version of presentation and arguments around Transformative Means Theory in Heritage.