Resilience of museum contents: a case study

The relationship between exhibitions and museum audiences has strongly changed in recent years (Black, 2012). In an ongoing attempt to engage people and maintain audiences, new museums as well as those under renovation have acknowledged the importance of offering creative spaces. The pendulum has swung from the museum as a temple to keep treasures to the museum as an active space, a toolbox. Today’s audiences are no longer looking for a cold ‘white cube’ museum experience (Nardi, 2008). Instead, they are looking for warmer, shared experiences, i.e. people can be closer to the artefact and even touch it (Candlin, 2017). This has induced attempts to exhibit museum artefacts in different ways. Nevertheless the exhibition devices for museums ought to be designed or strengthened to comply with the need of safety not only for the artefact but also for the visitors, in the sense established by current codes and regulations (Hensley, 1987; FEMA 528 and 530). Unfortunately the actions to which the artefacts are actually subjected are of different types. In addition to those related to the climate and environment changes, there are those due to the actions typical of the museum site, like the earthquakes, and those related to the political and cultural changes (Masi et al., 2019). The roots of the problem dates back to the first years of the sixties (Housner, 1963) and only recently has been applied to the museum contents (Agbabian et al., 1991; Erdik et al., 2010). An artefact can be in fact considered a rigid object placed on a shaking base that may enter a rocking motion and result in overturning. The problem becomes more complex when the behaviour of two stacked rigid bodies, like the complex statue-pedestal, is examined: the highly nonlinear formulation needs some simplifying assumptions (Psycharis, 1990; Spanos, 2001). In the case of a museum artifact, rocking behaviour is not a desired condition, but sliding should be sought (Gesualdo et al., 2018). The analytical problem examined in this paper is the dynamic behaviour of two stacked rigid bodies. The two rigid bodies can represent respectively the statue and its pedestal. The results can be useful in the determination of the optimal geometry of the pedestal, together with the friction coefficient between the statue and the moving floor (Monaco et al., 2014). The case study are marble statues in the Archeological Museum of Paestum.