Art mediation: technology of creating inclusive excursion programs

Tourist services for people with disabilities require special approaches from the performers to adapt the socio-cultural environment. In parallel with the accessible environment development, it is important to create new methods of presenting information during excursions and visits to socio-cultural objects. Contemporary museums are acting today as experimental platforms for testing new ways of interacting with people with disabilities as well as they are actively introducing various technologies of «cultural mediation» - art mediation in their practice. In this sense, inclusive programs in the museum can be viewed as a special niche of social tourism. Each museum develops its own art mediation technologies, which are determined by the theme and scale of the exposition, as well as the characteristics of the target groups of visitors. The article, through the example of the project «Perception - a mobile laboratory of art mediation for people with disabilities», presents the experience of creating an inclusive exhibition «The Poet’s Garden: Interaction», which was originally created for people with visual disabilities. But in the process of receiving tourist groups with using art mediation techniques, it turned out that the exhibition is accessible to different categories of visitors, that is inclusive. The authors describe in detail the stages of the art mediation program and analyze the main results of interaction with people with disabilities, believing that this case can be applied to other excursion programs and exhibitions. The main conclusion that the authors of the article come to is that the art mediation technique is a universal technique for creating inclusive excursion products.