Expanding Civic Discourse
A “Calophony” of Stories: Museum Collections Empowering the Voiceless
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Leonidas Argyros
The 2005 Faro Convention is concerned with the appropriation of cultural heritage by self-established communities. It recognizes the crucial role of alternative voices in creating an inclusive environment, where all those who feel ignored or marginalized by the official cultural orthodoxies may find a channel to express themselves. The Pluggable Social Platform for Heritage Awareness and Participation (PLUGGY) serves the Faro Convention by raising individuals and heritage communities to the role of creators, curators, advocates, and users of heritage assets. PLUGGY is web-based, accessible, and structured according to heritage consumers’ values, aspirations, and needs. It is a flexible instrument that enables citizens to share tangible and intangible heritage elements, build heritage communities, create distribution channels, and interact with each other. Heritage digital platforms, applications, and repositories already exist (Europeana, Google Cultural Institute) and compile collections from museums, libraries, and other institutions through virtualization. Their approach is top-down and is mainly supported by institutions. The average citizen is not involved in their creation and they fail to establish heritage communities. Social platforms have proven remarkably successful at building networks based on the contributions of their users. However, their possibilities have not been fully exploited with regards to cultural heritage promotion and integration in people's everyday life. PLUGGY bridges this gap by providing the necessary tools to allow users to share their local knowledge and everyday experience with others, together with the contribution of museums, building extensive networks around their common interest in connecting the past, the present, and the future.
From Online Witness to Emotional Witness: Technologies and Mediations in a Memory Museum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Diana Ordóñez Castillo
Science and technology studies (STS) are a source of valuable enquiries about the role of technology both as a product and agent of knowledge. Revising the museum, as a privileged socio-technical object, has proved its crucial participation within the most controversial issues of the public agenda. Particularly, a museum of memory appears to be a vital place for production of knowledge. It assembles certain expertise, practices, materialities, and subjects sharing a common factor, including the recognition of susceptibility, diversity, and even contradiction of community memory narratives. This research takes place in Museum Casa de la Memoria of the city of Medellin and uses a shared lens between STS and memory studies to account for the narrative and museographic strategies displayed in its permanent room. From the notions of laboratory as a place of knowledge and the process of creation of witnesses, the paper describes how the museum works with the epistemologies and procedures of a laboratory, highlighting how its exhibition, the museographic script and the objects of the collection “translate” the world to produce a testimony that is not only rational but transcends. This act moves towards the search for empathy, emotional commitment, and in a wider sense, serves as a strategy of reparation and reconciliation of the broader social and cultural dynamics of the city.
Risk and Utopia in the Youth Work of Museums
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ioannis Athanasiou
In recent years, there has been a growing body of research on young people’s museum learning and participation. Notwithstanding, evidence confirms that younger generations show low interest in museums and perceive them as being didactic, boring, or preoccupied with the past. My paper focuses on the limits and possibilities of inclusive heritage learning in this multidisciplinary and tensional intersection that can be called "youth work of museums." Funded by The Centre of Arts and Learning at Goldsmiths University of London, my doctoral qualitative research draws from ethnographic methods and two case studies in England to explore whether engagement with heritage in museums matters to those young people living in socially disadvantaged circumstances. The power relations that interplay in the interconnections of museums with youth on the margins of society tend to categorise them into a homogenised subordinated group. An inclusive museum has to acknowledge risks and substitute transmission pedagogies that normalise power-saturated relations and identity fallacies for a more integrated and embodied experiences of heritage as both learning and social practice. Informed by discourses of reflexive modernisation and governmentality, the paper emphasizes the civic role of museums as public institutions within risk society, as complicated by the ways in which culture and heritage are used to differentiate young people into social categories. I argue for a utopian approach in the contemporary museum that activates and recognises the contribution of young visitors to shape inclusive and accessible ways of sharing heritage within, between and beyond the confines of museum spaces.
In-Between Borders: Facilitating Cultural Encounters Within the Museum as Civic Space
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alexia Lobaina
As cultural institutions move towards more socially conscious awareness, we should fittingly reexamine how art museums can potentially become inclusive spaces of cultural empathy. To this end, art museums need be extracted from frameworks of dormancy and instead considered as spaces of civic engagement. By opting to redefine museums as civic sites, they are opened to be contact zones among diverse cultural spheres. This research analyzes art museums as sites of sociocultural pedagogical transformation by applying Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderland theory as a lens through which to explore the “border cultures”—or third spaces—that develop within socially charged civic sites. The relevancy and application of borderlands as a metaphorical grid applied to museum galleries delineates the meeting points between opposing cultures to promote transition and experiential exchange. By reconceptualizing border theory beyond geographical spaces, negligence in identifying and understanding the multitude of encounters facilitated within museums through the exhibiting of artwork can be overturned in order to better fully represent communities and aid in the interpretation and agency of marginal cultures, heritages, and experiences. I engage key concepts of defining space and cultural agency in order to draw a parallel between two non-traditionally civic sites: the art museum and a de facto ceiba tree monument in Miami, Florida’s Cuban Memorial Park. By exploring the ceiba as a socially transformative space, I examine how borderlands form and what transpires in the interstices between cultures and how these encounters can be used to increase relationality and cultural exchange within art museums.
