Whale HUB: Museum collections and contemporary art to promote sustainability among higher education students

Abstract

The project Whale HUB is dedicated to the recently-created permanent exhibition entitled “Tales of a Whale” at the Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence, centered around a fossilized whale skeleton. The exhibition, balanced between scientific research and dissemination of knowledge for non-expert audiences, deals with the themes of environmental sustainability, cross-cutting different fields of knowledge, such as palaeontology, zoology and ethnography, and promoting pro-environmental concern and behavior. Aiming to develop the Museum public and engage higher education students through new media strategies and non-canonical approaches, Whale HUB involves a selection of creative students from some of the major educational institutions in Florence to conduct an analysis on their perception of the themes dealt with by the exhibition. By means of a competition, the students create a communication prototype which popularizes the fragile stability of marine ecosystems, affected by plastic pollution. The project involves also three young contemporary artists who participate to an expedition in the marine protected area of Pelagos Sanctuary, hosting the largest population of large mammals of the Mediterranean and a problematic environmental site, highly impacted by marine plastic pollution. They produce artistic research in dialogue with scientists and biologists, sharing it with creative students of the university and of other important higher education institutions of Florence, fostering their engagement in sustainability through informal education or free-choice learning.