The Museum of Oriental Art and Culture (MACO) is the fruit of over 35 years of collaboration between the Municipality of Arcidosso in Grosseto Province, Italy, and the Merigar Dzogchen Community Cultural Association, a non-profit cultural association, founded by Prof. Namkhai Norbu, professor of Tibetan and Mongolian language and literature at the Oriental University of Naples from 1962 to 1992. The project was born from the wish of both institutions to find a home for the rich collection of over 5000 objects of fine Asian arts, crafts, and ethnographic artifacts from the Namkhai Collection.

The collection includes works of art of inestimable value and profound cultural significance, crafts and costumes, votive objects of considerable historical importance, as well as a significant collection of manuscripts and publications directly related to Namkhai Norbu’s research, along with a media archive, which documents many facets of Tibetan and Central Asian culture.

The architectural and conceptual plan of the MACO was inspired by the form of the mandala. This is also reflected in the logo of the Museum which was designed by Prof. Namkhai. The logo arranges the five principal sciences of traditional Buddhist studies: the arts, medicine, language and literature, and logic around the interior science of spiritual practice, represented by the Tibetan letter “A” at its center, to express the interdependent nature of these five sciences.

Rinpoche with the Mayors of Arcidosso and Adeje at the inauguration of the Museum.

The Museum is based in the former chancery building situated in the castle complex in Arcidosso which was made available by the Municipality of Arcidosso and was officially inaugurated on December 10, 2016.

The central atrium of the main gallery of the MACO was inspired by traditional Buddhist monastic architecture. It currently features an immersive 180-degree video documentary filmed in Western Sichuan in 2016, by two Italian filmmakers, featuring pastoral landscapes, mountainscapes, and Tibetan Buddhist monastic interiors and exteriors. This project furthers our mission of presenting Asian culture as both a vital part of our shared cultural patrimony and as a living contemporary reality. 

Exhibitions

Since its inauguration, the MACO has presented several exhibitions bringing many facets of Tibet Buddhism, history, and culture not only to the general public in situ and online but particularly to local primary and high school students.

A vintage photo of one of Giuseppe Tucci’s expeditions to Tibet

One of the first was Lhasa and Beyond, a photographic exhibition documenting the 1948 expedition to Central Tibet, led by the great Italian Orientalist and explorer Giuseppe Tucci, and documented in Tucci’s “To Lhasa and Beyond: Diary of the Expedition to Tibet in the year 1948” published almost 70 years ago. The exhibit displayed historical photographs from the 1948 expedition by Neapolitan photographer P. F. Mele as well as new images of the same sites revisited in 2016, creating a temporal bridge between the past and present, between a world that has vanished and one that is vanishing. The exhibition included a multimedia narrative recounting key moments of the Tucci expedition projected onto a 3D relief map of Tibet.

In 2018 the MACO inaugurated an exhibition entitled Sky Writing: The Calligraphic Art of Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, a sublime series of calligraphic works by brush in golden ink on a deep blue lapis lazuli paper. At the same time, some historical documents and manuscripts of great historical value were exhibited. 

The Meditation in Motion exhibition 2019-20 explored the world of Tibetan dance, through costumes, photographs, and video installations. The exhibition featured the revealed Vajra dances of Namkhai Norbu as well as the fuller Buddhist and Dzogchen context of visionary dances. Among the many splendid and extraordinary accomplishments of the late Chögyal Namkhai Norbu was the revelation of several sets of visionary dances for both men and women lay practitioners. 

Entrance to the exhibition Meditation in Motion, Footsteps to the Sublime. Guest curator Joseph Houseal, pictured. Photo by Alex Siedlecki.

Due to the widespread disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic at the time, few people could travel to the exhibition at the MACO so the museum decided to reach out and share online some video content relevant to the exhibition themes, including rare accounts by Sakya Trizin, and archival documentation of Pema Lingpa dances from the Kingdom of Bhutan as well as videos of the transcendent Vajra dances of the Dzogchen Community. 

Inaugurated in 2023 the Silk Road PIlgrimage surveys the cultural and commercial relationships between the East and West which have helped to shape our world. The movement of ideas, peoples and technologies, are told through the treasures in the Namkhai Collection, on display to the public for the first time. Spanning millennia, linking worlds and perspectives from across Asia, the exhibition explores the Buddhist principle of Interdependence.

Cham, the sacred dance of Tibet, part of the Silk Road Pilgrimage exhibition, dedicated to the intangible cultural heritage of Tibet.

Visitors are guided through the exhibition with descriptive panels, some referring to books and treasures found in the Dunhuang cave library, to demonstrate how Buddhism evolved through the Silk Road, shaping and influencing the civilizations of Asia.

The Silk Road Pilgrimage also presents a new 360-degree video production for the virtual theater installation in the central atrium of the museum, with videos from the Xiantangshan caves, depicting Buddhist statues from the Qi Dynatsy (550-577), which were first shown at the SMART Museum in Chicago and at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery, kindly provided by the Taiyuan University of Technology in Taiyuan, Shanxi, China. 

The medieval building housing the MACO.

More recently The Secret Murals of the Lukhang Temple photographic exhibition was presented at the MACO in the summer of 2024. In 1981 Professor Namkhai Norbu, returning to Lhasa after more than 20 years, made the first photographs of what were then considered the most secret images of Tibet, the 18th-century murals of the Lukhang, a small temple located behind the Potala Palace which contains what has become known as the Sistine Chapel of Tibetan Buddhism. The images of the Lukhang present a panorama of Tibetan culture in the 1700s and an authentic visual guide to enlightenment. 

Photo by Oleksandr Zhytko

Building Bridges and Creating Connections: MACO and the British Museum

Chögyal Namkhai Norbu crossing the bridge to Khyung Lung dNgul mKhar. © 2021 Namkhai Collection / MACO

The MACO’s collaboration with the British Museum and their ResearchSpace team has helped the museum to share the Namkhai Collection with Dzogchen Community members around the world.

ResearchSpace (RS) is software for detecting and mapping the intricate interdependencies of the world’s cultural heritage. It includes the first search engine specifically built to find and manage resources in a museum environment. It employs the linked open data standard developed by the International Council of Museums (ICOM – UNESCO), CIDOC-CRM. Rather than simply cataloging an artifact, ResearchSpace permits the possibility of describing the relationships between artifacts, ideas, and resources within their broader cultural context. In this way, RS improves access to digital artifacts by providing more relevant ways of revealing the relationships between them.

MACO’s contribution

To manage its collection of over 5 million artifacts, the British Museum uses RS together with a commercial collection management system (CMS). Since their collection management system is beyond the needs and financial means of a small museum like the MACO, the MACO proposed and funded a customization of RS, substituting their CMS with an open-source institutional digital repository called FEDORA (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture). FEDORA is used by the Smithsonian, the British Library, and many universities around the world.

During the course of MACO’s collaboration with the British Museum, they decided to adopt our customization as part of their next major software release of RS. As a consequence, the BM has invested a considerable amount of its own resources in the realization of this upgrade. Thanks to the MACO’s contribution, RS is now poised to become an open-source platform for connecting the collections of cultural heritage institutions, large and small, everywhere.

The advantage of ResearchSpace in the planning of an international project is that it has also been designed as a virtual collaborative environment. MACO’s institutional partners and curators will be able to use RS to share their resources and research and collaboratively build the exhibition’.

ResearchSpace helps the MACO enrich these physical exhibits with relevant links to digital resources, and also permits the creation and sharing of links to resources in the collections in other museums. QR codes are inserted within the exhibits, permitting visitors to query RS for media resources and more detailed information.  

Working with Local Schools

The MACO works in synergy with local institutions, in particular with schools of all levels, organizing courses and workshops. Guided tours offer teachers and their students educational itineraries which help to raise awareness of various aspects of Asian art and culture. MACO adopts an experiential and multiform approach to its educational programs, employing modern pedagogical techniques and methods such as guided explorations, storytelling, and dramatizations, including music and dance. The MACO prides itself on introducing new technology to visitors as part of its contemporary communications strategy.

Photo by Oleksandr Zhytko

The MACO strongly believes that new technologies are an important means for museum education, and the involvement of young people, and has included multimedia paths using the latest generation of virtual reality. Visitors can virtually visit Tibetan monasteries, caves, and archaeological sites.

The virtual theater in the center of the museum was designed to immerse the viewer inside the landscapes filmed specifically with three cameras in Tibet and China. Contemporary Tibetan dances are also projected within the virtual theater and visitors can try to follow them.

The multimedia map inside the museum was created during a workshop with a numerically controlled milling machine to involve young people and the local community in the realization of the museum. On the map of Central Asia, educational itineraries are projected such as the various journeys undertaken in Asia by the Italian explorer Giuseppe Tucci.

School Projects

The MACO’s educational proposal consists of a flexible work plan, which makes available to teachers resources and activities that can be chosen and articulated according to the times and paths that they consider most appropriate according to the age of the students, the type of classes, and their specific objectives.

Recently with the Silk Roads Exhibition, in adventurous virtual journey, students were able to acquire fundamental information on the subject and receive appropriate stimuli to arouse and satisfy their natural curiosity about particular issues thanks to the QR codes. The visit included proposals for games and quizzes designed to encourage discussion and collaboration between students and their teachers, allowing the latter to identify and orient the interests of their students with a view to reworking and eventual in-depth studies, for which they could make use of the additional resources made available by MACO.

Local children listening to a story about Tibet at the Museum.

There were also targeted interventions by experts in the different subject areas, specific theoretical-practical workshops, led by experts, to foster learning by doing (for example: ritual masks, alphabets, and scripts of the East, etc.) as well as a play inspired by Wu Cheng’en’s, Journey to the West.

For three-year high school students, there is the possibility of developing school projects that will directly involve them in museum activities and promote contacts and collaboration with their colleagues in Asia.

One of the underlying missions of the MACO is to give the possibility for young people to mature their awareness that the histories of others are equally important and worthy of being told, not only because they contribute to a better understanding of our own history but because they induce reflection on the relationship between individual stories and general human history and improve knowledge of the physical and geographical space of the non-European portion of the Eurasian continent.

Featured image: The Sectret Murals of the Lukhang Temple: Photographs by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu.