Mikhail Piotrovsky: The Hermitage needs imperial confidence. Among other things, so as to stick to its strategy
Just now we are working out a strategy for the Hermitage. We are being guided by the two most important things in the present day: matters “digital” and human capital.
Digital culture is very important for museums in the current difficult situation. Cloud-based structures, digital doubles and copies permit us to easily reach outside the informational and cultural blockade and make ourselves accessible to the whole world.
The “digital” makes it possible to change the vectors of our relationships, the orbits of the Hermitage satellites…
It also frees up time. The pandemic showed us that very many things can be done remotely – and we are creating flexible working hours: people perform part of their job from home.
However, the “digital” also gives bureaucrats the opportunity to intensify their monitoring of us two or three times over. We shall resist that, because for the museum it is important not just to liberate people from serfdom, so to speak, but to give them the chance to express themselves to the maximum.
As for human capital, we are now trying to nurture the upcoming young generation – and to do so in such a way that they will cope with situations when the world turns upside down, as we in our time had to in the early 1990s. We realize that it is necessary not only to address ourselves to young people, but to bring them into life – right now. To that end, we are operating a programme called 17+. We have the Youth Centre that is constantly conducting intellectual marathons and mediations with students. There is the “Youth” project that gets students and schoolchildren involved in the research work of Hermitage scholars (the books Gardens and Butterflies have been published on the basis of the resultant materials).
We have a consultative youth board. We talk with young people absolutely as equals and try to get them involved in doing things – so that they do not simply go to the museum, but are prepared to assume the responsibility that we once had to take on.
Not long ago, as part of the 17+ programme, we launched a theatre-laboratory in the Hermitage’s General Staff building. Students from the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts – young playwrights, directors and actors – devised and staged pieces relating to 12 pictures in the Shchukin and Morozov Gallery. Those weren’t theatrical illustrations to accompany the great paintings, but allusions – a complex theatrical reaction to complex pictures, little poetic, symbolic scenes, some in the spirit of Kharms, others in the spirit of Zoshchenko.
A few years back, we already implemented the Flora project with some colleagues from Vienna in the gallery of Old Master paintings, the basis of which was texts by world-renowned poets, from Shakespeare to Olga Sedakova.
Important to us as well, of course, is the imperial spirit that has endured in the Hermitage through imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet times. We also come under fire for that from all quarters – from our own bureaucrats to “critics” in London.
We always keep in mind, though, that an empire is a love of variety, that the preservation of imperial confidence bolsters confidence in our, by and large, highly-strung teams of museum personnel. We are confident that we are doing everything right. And we need imperial confidence, among other things, so as to work out a strategy and stick to it.
This material was published on the website of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper. The Russian-language original can be found here.
