Museum of Cultures (Lugano)

The Museo delle Culture di Lugano (MUSEC) was opened on 23 September 1989 with the aim of preserving most of the ethnic art collected by Serge Brignoni and coming in particular from the Far East, India, South-East Asia, Indonesia and Oceania.

The "Fondazione culture e musei (FCM)" allows for a more effective management, capable, thanks also to the renovated Villa Malpensata premises, of generating further synergies and economies of scope and of intensifying interaction with the territory and the public.

The Heleneum is a villa on the shores of Lake Lugano built between 1930 and 1934 on the architectural model of the "Petit Trianon" in Versailles by Hélène Bieber, a strong-willed cosmopolitan lady who wanted to transform it into a centre for social and cultural entertainment and who lived there until 1967.

Especially because of the economic crisis of the 1930s, Hélène Bieber failed in her intentions and the Heleneum remained a sparsely inhabited dwelling until, in 1969, it was bought by the Municipality of Castagnola, now a district of the City of Lugano.

From 1971 to 1973, the villa hosted the summer courses and seminars of the Ticino Institute of High Studies, directed by Elémire Zolla, which brought together important scholars of different disciplines on the themes of religious knowledge.

Later, until 1976, the Heleneum was the seat of the Centre for Semantic and Cognitive Studies of the Dalle Molle Institute, which operated in the field of artificial intelligence, at that time in its early days, and which organized various seminars attended by scholars and researchers from all over the world.

The collection thus bears witness, first of all, to the link between the forms of creativity of the "South Seas" cultures and the object that the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century discussed in their circles and tried to create in their works.

An itinerary full of meanings allows the visitor, among other things, to interact dynamically with the themes and works presented in the other exhibition spaces of the museum, sometimes anticipating them, sometimes providing valuable keys of interpretation, useful to grasp the unity of the museographic project.