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- Convenors:
-
Fatima Brana
(University of Vigo)
Xose Carlos Sierra (Museo do Pobo Galego)
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- Stream:
- Archives and Museums
- Location:
- Aula 5
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 April, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This session invites participants to think out of their museological boxes: by taking further the debate on the decolonial turn, museums are thought and reworked here as laboratories with communities and groups where social equality is constructed and empowered.
Long Abstract:
This event explores museums' inherent potential in being powerful instruments for social inclusion and communities' advocacy: how can museums and heritage policies disentangled themselves from structural inequality? How can grassroots groups and collectives help in the creation of a common language and shared practices with communities?
The morning panel will conjure up papers that reflect on collaborative projects with communities in the fields of museums and heritage, as well as alternative means of doing heritage in contemporary society that have contributed to the construction of social equality. Interestingly, representations and memories of specific groups are discriminated within heritage practices in the same way as they are in the broader social context: heritage narratives usually reinforce the status quo, rather than developing inclusion and equality. The panel will reflect whether collaborative projects can efficaciously deconstruct inequality.
After panel session, twenty selected participants will be subdivided in four groups in order to realize a small exhibition—informed by communities' knowledge or that functions as a creative intervention against inequality—that will be hosted in the conference venue the following day. With this purpose in mind, participants will be asked to bring at the event ethnographic data, including material artefacts and multimedia, previously submitted to the panelists. Additional material for the realization of the exhibition—supports for the installation, etc.—will be negotiated after the selection procedure with participants. Given the different formats of the event, the second session will be hosted in a space more suitable for the realization of the exhibition.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 April, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper, we discuss the experience under the Open Museum Project. The aim of the project is to bring cultural heritage and the functions of the museum closer to groups that do not have an easy access to a museum or other cultural activities. The project's goal is to show the particular visions of three groups, as well as to present to them the cultural heritage the museum works on.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, we discuss the experience under the Open Museum Project. The aim of the project is to bring cultural heritage and the functions of the museum closer to groups that do not have an easy access to a museum or other cultural activities. The project's goal is to show the particular visions of three groups, as well as to present to them the cultural heritage the museum works on.
The project implements workshops designed specifically for three groups: inmates from the jail of Pereiro de Aguiar, Alzheimer patients who attend the workshops from the association AFAOR from Ourense (Spain), and learning impaired people who are cared for at the Red Cross day centre in Ribadavia (Ourense- Spain).
Each of these groups and organisations we work with needs a tailored design in order to work with the Museum's heritage. Therefore, the Museum staff develops every year three different workshops targeting each of these groups, and following the same topic related to the Museum's collection.
So this experience is showing us that it can be appropriate to work with ethnographic collections for the mixed public. Even more since its objective is to promote equality and to carry out activities which are aimed at inclusion and visualizing of excluded groups.
Keywords: Social inclusion, museum of ethnology, non-formal education.
Paper short abstract:
I propose to observe the inclusion of ethnographic artifacts, re-categorized as works of art, in the National Gallery of Canada in the light of the concept of "artification". This process has to be read as one of the forms of the decolonization of museum spaces begun in the 1990s
Paper long abstract:
The beginning of the 21st century, Canada is showing itself to be both vital and restless with respect to museology and museum exhibitions. Many indigenous cultural centers have opened autonomous museum spaces in various parts of the country. Those "tribal museums" of which Clifford had offered a glimpse of at the end of the 1990s have therefore "exploded" and the important "majority museums" are showing great unease, changing names, for example, but also more radically, their narratives and displays. The most important art museums in the country have begun to include historical indigenous artifacts in their narratives and galleries. In my paper I propose to observe the inclusion of ethnographic artifacts, re-categorized as works of art, in the National Gallery of Canada in the light of the concept of "artification". This process seeks not to define what art is nor how it should be considered, but how and under what circumstances it comes about. The artification process, in my opinion, has to be read as one of the forms of the decolonization of museum spaces in post-colonial contexts, begun in the 1990s. In particular I propose to interpret the processes of displacement and re-categorization of ethnographic materials as one of the forms of the broader restitution process to indigenous communities; a process which includes: land ownership, stories, rights to fishing and hunting, repatriation of objects, etc..
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnography and practice-based research in Scotland's Northern Isles, this paper considers a performative praxis of co-curating maritime heritage-making as future assembling, deliberative value formation, elicitive of social learning for sustainable development in vulnerable environments.
Paper long abstract:
At the North Atlantic's crossroads, the Northern Isles were once central to international flows of people, goods and ideas. Now, their open economies, high youth out-migration, and ecosystems abraded by climate change indicate precarity. Here, maritime heritages track millennia of islands-situated responses to global dynamics. In museums, and households; submerged, and terrestrial, their construction tacks a course between "Authorised Heritage Discourse" (Smith 2006), and heritage-making "from below" (Robertson 2008).
This multi-media paper presents emergent research into how Orcadians and Shetlanders connect and/or disarticulate around this heritage-making, and proposes co-curation as a routeway for collaborative, "deliberative value formation" (Kenter et al 2016), elicitive of social learning for sustainable development. The epistemology, developed through ethnography, opens-up islander's conceptualisations of their maritime heritages, from early subsistence to the contested industries of marine-derived energies and cruise tourism. It informs an 'in-real-life' and 'in-virtual' co-curation with communities across both archipelagos. Once atomised objects; archives; practices; traditions, and sites are assembled and re-mobilised in new modalities: film; artworks, and digital modelling, embodying performative inclusivity and holism.
Through "shared authority" (Hutchison 2013), museum curators, boat-builders, mariners and artists, prototype co-curation as praxis. Getting "hands dirty" (Witcomb and Buckley 2013) together, through their process they track the value-formations that privilege selected aspects of Northern Isles' identity-work whilst others are 'forgotten'. Cultural expressions, lately instrumentalised in commodified "identikits" (Macdonald 1997), are re-considered as future-assembling resources. Questions emerge, including: can maritime heritage-making offer reveal way-markers for sustainable island-living, and is co-curation a useful track for communities choosing preferred futures?