Page 288 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015288spanning 4,200 square feet devoted to artefacts, histories and ideas on death and its cultural rep- resentations. It originates from a successful blog started up in 2007 by Joanna Ebenstein, an artist and historian with an interest in the bizarre.Ebenstein and a few partners began to catalogue strange relics, old toys, medical curiosities and other uncommon articles of interest to morbid and pathological anatomy. After that they began to organise conferences and hold workshops, succeeding in building up a community of both followers and artists and collectors. Ebenstein started up a campaign through Kickstarter to raise the 60,000 dollars needed for a three-four building to house a small museum. It raised 76,013 dollars. It is an example of how it is possible to go from the Net to a physical space thanks to crowdfunding, as in the aforemen- tioned case of the Nikola Tesla museum.Other museums have followed suit, such as the Amsterdam Museum, which raised more than 51,349 euros to restore The Arrival of Napoleon executed by Matthieu van Bree in 1813;185and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,with the campaign to acquire the Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus by the Impressionist painter Edouard Manet, which raised 10.13 million euros thanks to the contributions of more than 1,000 people.186In Spain we do not yet have many examples of the use of crowdfunding in museums, though a few institutions are venturing into this area, albeit timidly.In 2013 the Museu del Ferrocarril de Cata- lunya (Catalonia railway museum) launched acrowdfunding campaign187 on Verkami to restore the steam locomotive of Mataró, which had been in the workshops of the Associació per a la Reconstrucció i Posta en Servei de Material Ferroviari Històric, an association devotedto restoring historical trains, since 2012. The restoration paid for collectively was intended to enhance the value of a unique asset and involve the community in preserving a heritage that is part of collective identity.To contribute to the restoration of the loco- motive, the national railway operator RENFE made an initial contribution of 41,000 euros. The idea had been to raise the remaining 31,000 euros through the micropatronage campaign, but much to everyone’s surprise 35,000 euros were raised due to the fact that the project was presented as the recovery of a heritage that belonged to everyone and which everyone had the duty to preserve and safeguard for future generations.Similarly, in order to encourage people to take part, individuals, companies or organisations that contributed to this project were entitled to tax relief under the scheme provided for in Title II of Law 49/2002.Contributions could range from 15 to 5,000 euros and the perks included free tickets to the museum, discounts on the AVE high-speed train and a special mention in the patrons section on the museum’s website.In 2013 Barcelona Council launched its first campaign of this kind188 for the restoration of the frescos of the Chapel of Saint Michael in the Monastery of Pedralves. These paintings areFocus 2015. Museums and New Technologies