Image © Adolfo Tosti
On June 8, Goppion will present at "Accumulare Archiviare Allestire nei Musei," a bilingual conference on museum storage hosted at Palazzo Farnese in Rome and organized in collaboration with ICOM Italia's working group on museum storage and circularity.
Our presentation addresses a problem that most museums share but few have resolved. According to a 2024 report by ICOM's Working Group on Collections in Storage, nearly 70% of museums worldwide exhibit less than 15% of their collections. A third have exhausted their available storage space. Almost 30% have largely incomplete inventories.
The numbers describe an industry-wide condition: the museum that visitors experience is a fraction of what the institution actually holds. The rest sits in deposits that are often under-resourced, under-documented, and physically inadequate for the conservation demands placed on them.
Our talk, titled "From Accumulation to Ordering," argues that the gap between stored and exhibited collections is not only an intellectual or curatorial challenge. It is a physical one. An ordering conceived on paper but never realized in space remains potential. To exist, it has to become shelves, cabinets, drawers, climate-controlled environments, and accessible layouts. It has to become a place where objects can be found, studied, and preserved.
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Storage Solutions
This is the territory of museotecnica in its fullest sense: not supplying storage furniture, but physically realizing the ordering of a collection. The same engineering principles that govern exhibition display cases (airtightness, climate stability, material safety, modularity) apply with equal urgency to the spaces where the vast majority of a museum's holdings actually reside.
The presentation draws on projects spanning several decades, from early modular deposit systems designed as dedicated research environments to recent installations where the display case itself integrates exhibition and archival storage in a single conservation-grade device. Across these examples, a consistent principle emerges: storage that works is storage that has been designed with the same rigor and specificity as the galleries above it.
The conference brings together museum professionals, architects, and conservation specialists from Italy and France. Goppion is a sponsor of the event.
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