The project known as “Save your Place – Meetings at the Museum”, part of the Museum of Lisbon’s cultural mediation programme, has been awarded the Partnership Prize at the year’s APOM Awards.
The Partnership Prize recognises cooperative practices, particularly networking, between museums, and similar institutions, and partners operating both within and outside the museum sector. It aims to promote the areas of innovation and social and territorial impact, creating new audiences and developing the projects’ social and cultural products and environmental and social sustainability.
Set up in 2020 in partnership with Alzheimer Portugal, MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Acesso Cultura and the Institute of Health Sciences at the Portuguese Catholic University, “Save your Place – Meetings at the Museum” sets out to provide people with Dementia and their carers with the opportunity to participate in meaningful cultural activities in a museum context, based on the museum collections and the themes covered in the long and short-term exhibitions.
Four trial editions of “Save your Place – Meetings at the Museum” took place in 2021 and 2022, with the participation of 21 people with dementia and 20 carers. Subsequent evaluation of the impact of these events confirmed that there had been improvements in the autonomy and well-being of participants with dementia, while they also proved to be an important way of combating isolation and social exclusion of these people and their carers.
Following on from the success of these pilot sessions, this year the Museum of Lisbon has raised the bar even higher and is now offering this community dedicated, free visits to the different parts of the Museum. These will run alongside the regular monthly programme, which consists of sessions held on the last Friday of each month at Palácio Pimenta.
As a result of the experience gained in this project and through the sharing of experiences with other museums involved in ongoing projects with people with dementia, the initiative known as MID was also launched this year. MID, which stands for Museums for the Inclusion of Dementia, will be made up of eleven Portuguese institutions: the Museum of Lisbon, Acesso Cultura, Alzheimer Portugal, the Modern Art Centre at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the University of Coimbra’s Botanical Garden, MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, the Science Museum at the University of Coimbra, the Pombal Municipal Museum, the Grão Vasco/DGPC National Museum, the Machado de Castro/DGPC National Museum and the Tesouro da Misericórdia de Viseu/SCMV Museum.
