Connecting the Dots
Your Heritage Is Our Heritage!: Ottoman Cultural Heritage at Nordiska museet in Stockholm
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ulla Karin Warberg
Nordiska museet was founded in 1873 according to the idea of National Romanticism to which the founder Arthur Hazelius was a follower. As the largest culture history museum in Sweden it has a collection of 1.5 million objects and the task of depicting life and work in Sweden and the Nordic countries from the sixteenth century until today. Despite its name, Nordiska museet is not an essential museum with objects only from the Nordic countries in its collections, even though they are in a majority. But objects with another cultural origin can be difficult to identify since they were by tradition written in to the museum narrative as just objects with no further description. No regard to the objects' original context was taken, such as how they were ordered, made, used, and valued. As if their “lives” started with the acquisition to the museum. So for an example, an Anatolian carpet was just described as a carpet. This has changed during the last decades. Since I am interested in objects that originate from the Ottoman Empire, I have been able to identify a number of them in the museum collection, very sparsely described and not as Ottoman. All acquired in the early twentieth century. There is also an eternity deposition from 1937 hanging in one of the museum stairways, containing fourteen paintings depicting a procession in Constantinople 1656 with the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV and his entourage. So the question is whose cultural heritage do the Ottoman objects in the collection of Nordiska museet belong to? Who has the right to tell their story and from what point of view? Nordiska museet is a museum for everyone and up front when it comes to reevaluating its collections and exhibitions. From being objects in the shadow, these Ottoman objects are to be looked upon as assets and bridge builders. Today’s Sweden is a country of diversity, with many citizens originated from countries that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire. That means there is a new group of visitors to Nordiska museet who wants to know more about Sweden and the Nordic countries. As a curator it is my responsibility and joy to give an orientation in the cultural history of the Nordic countries as well as show the visitors the connection between our cultures and cultural heritages. In my paper I will give examples on how we work at the Nordiska museet and how we reevaluate objects in our collection, discussing how the objects become assets and bridge builders between people from different cultural backgrounds.
Inclusive Practices: Multiple Voices and a Layered Approach to Knowledge Production
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ros Croker
How do you reconcile traditional and new approaches to knowledge production to include multiple perspectives and create inclusive galleries? Over the last four years, the National Maritime Museum has been on a journey of development to create four new permanent galleries, bringing 1000 more objects out for display. Working collaboratively with communities, we developed a layered model to combine traditional and new thinking in knowledge production and create a shared vision for the galleries. This session will introduce the approaches we took and the challenges we faced along the way. It will talk about macro and micro relationships and projects that fed into the final galleries. From a national participatory tour and testing and consultation, to in-depth co-curation projects, critical friends, and artist commissions. We will explore how communities had agency in the gallery development process. This paper will consider the new working relationships and practices created across the museum as a result and the value of working with audiences to achieve ownership and relevance.
Dialogue as Shared Vision: Dissolving Boundaries in Migration Museums and Heritage Sites
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Conny Bogaard
In recent years, old paradigms of museums as knowledge makers and cultural creators have been replaced by the new ideology of museums as agents of social change. Aware of the fact that all museums signify specific moral stances, this paper will argue against museum positionality, be it a presumed neutrality or a reformist agenda. Instead it will consider how art can be used effectively in the museum space to express social issues in a more subtle way, one that is more open to different types of interpretations. The philosophical underpinning for this approach comes from Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin who argues for the creation of aesthetic events to upset the hegemonic discourse. In the aesthetic event, Bakhtin argues, there is an asymmetry between artist and receiver that undermines the notion of sameness, or the presumed fusion of self and other. Significantly, this observation is a corrective for recent theories of empathy that dominate museology and heritage studies. According to some authors, empathy is crucial for transmitting social memory and therefore, has the potential to foster shared visions. Although empathy is indeed a force against selfishness and indifference the problem lies with its agenda to dissolving the boundaries between one person and another. In contrast, the asymmetry found in the aesthetic event aims at dialogue, understood as a creative understanding of the differences between the self and other.
Community-based Ecotourism as Living Culture Museums
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pierre Walter
This paper draws on a research project examining visitor learning in five community-based ecotourism (CBET) projects in Cambodia, Thailand, Nepal, and Vietnam, respectively. It proposes that the experience of visiting CBET sites can be conceptualized in much the same manner as experiencing a Living History Museum, but with a greater depth of engagement and learning, and authentic relationships. In CBET projects, visitors live with local host families, eat local food, engage in traditional livelihood activities, and participate in cultural events, and are guided by local hosts to see environmental attractions. These village-based CBET projects are located in natural sites of great beauty and biodiversity (pristine tropical forests, marine reef islands, high mountains), and are run by local or Indigenous Peoples. As in CBET, visitors to living heritage sites see their visits as educational, recreational and leisure pursuits. They expect interactive engagement with another time, culture and place, and may take on performative and interpretive roles. In the staging of living history, artisans typically explain and produce crafts and visitors can engage in hands-on activities. This paper further draws out these parallels and offers some conclusions for CBET as a sort of "inclusive museum" of living culture.
