Conceived as a tourist route for the city of Cagliari, carried out using a bus set up at a specific time and with the participation of a guide who gave the relevant explanations, the Victim Tour, a project by Paco Cao edited by MAN, supposes a revision of the occult history of the city from the perspective of the existence of victims, understanding this term in a very broad sense. In fact, the itinerary is configured as an immersion in the history of the victim of the city of Cagliari through specific stages in which both the buildings and the urban surroundings acted as witnesses to a human experience which did not appear to be less relevant for the fact of remaining occult. The union of two seemingly contradictory concepts – tourism, associated with leisure and fun, and the victim, associated with less luminous places of the human condition – serves as a platform for reflection on current concepts and concerns. The Victim Tour closely follows the four relevant aspects of the current FestArch program: seeing – because it offers an unusual look at the city – remembering – because it presupposes a reclamation of a little-known or directly ignored part of the historical memory – welcoming – because it implies an open invitation to the entire public and has as its objective a comprehensive discourse – to defend – because the very objective of the project contains within itself an implicit germ of claims.

The tour is an action of the Victim Museum, an institution that aims to present history from the perspective of those who have been victims of someone or something, giving the term victim its broadest meaning: so, for example, nature can be understood as a victim of the predatory abuses of human beings, but the latter, in turn, can be considered a victim of the environment itself, as happens in the case of natural disasters. Aware of the double nature of victim and executioner that the human condition implicitly possesses, the Victim Museum is an independent institution, guided by rigor and depth, foreign to political interests of any kind. It therefore constitutes a space for historical reflection, debate and comparison of ideas with a vocation of impartiality.

The Museum’s exhibition space is virtual, and its collection is made up of digital reproductions granted by different institutions and private individuals. This collection is made up of various documents and includes manuscripts, photographs, videos and audio testimonies. Currently, the Victim Museum – while waiting to fully develop its exhibition space – is preparing an introductory web page which will serve to present both the spirit of the project and the general lines of implementation. The absence of an architectural space will not prevent the institution also has a legal space – currently being consolidated – which will certify its museum status. Founded on the Mexican-American border – Juarez City – in August 2006, the Museum of the Victim undertook research work in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, starting a study phase – still ongoing – based on reconsidering the history of the victim in same geographical environment.

The aim of the Museum is to create new collections in other specific geo-political environments and, at the same time, develop a universal history of the victim which will be presented in parallel with the local collections. The Victim’s Museum, in addition to creating, displaying, conserving and expanding its collection and the exhibition space that houses it, aims to develop a program of parallel activities that energize the institution and establish collaborations with different institutes. The First Victim’s Forum, which took place on May 16, 2007 – together with the advertising campaign addressed to the population of Juarez City (State of Chihuahua, Mexico) – was the first public event organized by the institution. Paco Cao (Asturias, Spain 1965) lives and works in New York.

The MAN presents an installation by Leonardo Boscani and his travel agency Vu Vulà. A looping video with a series of faces of foreign people pronouncing the word “vuvulà” without sound, which instead comes out of the horns located in an old Fiat 500.

During the three days of the event the first passports are issued by the agency. The Vu Vulà agency deals with all types of travel and forms of terrestrial and celestial migration, the climbing of the known and unknown worlds (for the latter thanks to the subsidiary agency Cosmik).

The agency offers, through various activities (travel and wandering advice, pleasure stays on the Moon, information and organization of trips to unknown lands and immaterial territories, printing of documents, dissemination of multimedia information, posters, flyers, internet (www. vuvula.org), provision of makeshift means and vehicles, raising awareness of the condition of migrants and the culture of wandering, escape and exile and other services not included in the catalogue), to contribute to the imagination of travel and migration contemporary.

With Vu Vulà, Leonardo Boscani (often in collaboration with other participants, artists and otherwise) proposes urban interventions, public campaigns and collective actions. The condition of being an islander (Leonardo Boscani lives and works in Sardinia) is undoubtedly at the origin of the imagery of travel and migration developed by the artist, but the idea goes much further: it is the migrant becoming of modern society that fuels the project, is nomadism as a planetary destiny. This becoming is shared by tourists, as a pastime, and by emigrants, who flee poverty or impossible conditions of survival.

Two opposing attitudes of travellers, such as the freedom and imagination of choices compared to the obligation and involuntary nature suffered by those who escape poverty and the fate of exiles. But they have in common the dream and the experience of moving and travelling. Because the tourist is certainly not as free as he is led to believe, but rather the migrant who is pushed beyond his desperation by a desire, an essential need. Leonardo Boscani (Sassari, 1961) lives and works in Sardinia.

Museum Sprints 2000-2001, a project curated by Cristiana Collu and the MAN created in collaboration with the Suzy Shammah Gallery in Milan, consists of a series of short videos that show the artist Florian Slotawa in a sports outfit walking through the exhibition spaces of some of the major German art museums (Kunsthalle Mannheim, Museum Fridericianum, Kunstsammlung NRW, Dusseldorf, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Lenbachhaus, Munchen, Alte Pinakothek, Munchen, Diozesanmuseum Freising, MMK, Frankfurt am Main, Museum Abteiberg Monchengladbach).

Made between 2000 and 2001, they seem to comment on the contemporary acceleration of cognitive optical processes. The theatrical and performative nature of all Florian Slotawa’s works becomes explicit in these videos: each installation is contingent and provisional, confined within specific temporal and spatial boundaries. Florian Slotawa (Rosenheim, 1972) lives and works in Berlin.