TAM: Tower Art Museum

Fondazione Italia Patria della Bellezza has chosen Tam – Tower Art Museum one of the three prize-winning projects within the 2023 call for proposals. Initially planned for 2018, TAM, a private contemporary art museum, opened in Matera on 1 December 2022. The project Volevo solo aprire un museo (I just wanted to open a museum) ironically recounts on YouTube and Instagram the years of waiting and bureaucratic problems encountered by the young founders to open a social enterprise in the South. Today, the tower in the heart of Matera's Sassi, once abandoned, houses a permanent collection and two annual exhibitions featuring local, national and international artists.

In 1993 Matera was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. The founding partners of Torretta srl, who were born and raised in Matera, have experienced first-hand the risk of "dysneification" that Matera runs. The museum now wants to overturn the cliché that sees the city's history often simplified: from ‘national shame’ to World Heritage Site. Today more than ever it is necessary to tell the story of a place that is alive and productive. The social enterprise wanted to open a museum so that the city would not become a museum.

The award-winning project develops its cultural strategy by curating uniquely site-specific projects. In addition, Tower Art Museum also becomes a space for the production of external events such as festivals, exhibitions and workshops, and offers services for cultural design.

TAM believes that the role of the museum is to create spaces of co-habitation where real policies for experiencing the city can be developed. The recent opening allows the social enterprise to give physical form to the work previously initiated by the initiative ‘I just wanted to open a museum’. The museum lends itself not as a witness but as an agent for communities to build a livable future through the beauty that has been handed down to us.