Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Due to its varied collections of artefacts from different cultures and different areas of society, the museum acts as a cultural repository and a cultural maker. Using Aleida Assman’s concepts of canon and archive, the paper goes beyond the idea of the museum as a cultural repository. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the Bucharest Municipality Museum has received various private donations that have become museums under its administration, thereby its role has shifted towards a creator of cultural content. Additionally, the museum has a continuous open policy regarding public donations that has resulted in the presence of donated artefacts in some of our temporary exhibitions. The act of transforming donated objects with a personal value into something of meaning for the entire community outlines the museum’s role as a cultural creator. Thus, the donated collections and the artefacts are integrated into the common cultural memory, whether it is the active memory (canon) or the passive one (archive) and given a new meaning. As a cultural historian and a museum curator, this process has interesting research ramifications that have not been explored in Romania insofar.