Emerging Connections
Didar - Manuscript Communities of Practice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sophie Lewincamp, Asli Gunel
In 2022, the exhibition Didar - Stories of Middle Eastern Manuscripts opened at The University of Melbourne. For the first time, sixty manuscripts from the collection were on display alongside conservation research. Researchers had long desired the opportunity to engage with communities of origin however this posed many challenges. Just because conservators want to engage, do communities? Previously the collection was inaccessible and although now digitised online, access is still problematic. The exhibition presented an opportunity to trial different activities in the space such as a poetry reading, film screening and a food-inspired collab with a local social enterprise to attract a diverse audience. Our approach was broad, inspired by manuscripts themes, artistic practices and materials. The activities were key in developing diverse manuscript communities, a team of advocate-users, exchanging ideas and knowledge. The varied nature of the activities presented multiple outcomes and observations Excitingly there was interest and appetite for collection use by communities. The themes that arose were a connection to cultural heritage and inclusion. We expected collaborations to further collection knowledge however more was gained. New manuscript communities are created, and members took ownership of the development of ideas and delivery of events. It is our hope that the skills and knowledge we have gained through these experiences act as a motivator and guide to those with an interest in further professionalising their community engagement strategies.
Featured The New Palais de Glace: Changes at the Palacio Nacional de las Artes in Argentina View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jonathan Feldman
In 2019, a new director was appointed to the Palacio Nacional de las Artes (Palais de Glace), an institution in charge of, among other things, the organization of the National Salon of Arts, the most prestigious award event for artists in Argentina. Feda Baeza, who was undergoing a gender transition at the time, led a team of young professionals into a new era of the Salon Nacional, bringing forth a politically engaged program of exhibitions and public events. This paper analyzes the nature of the changes introduced at the Palais de Glace, and the National Salon, which describes a process of inclusion and community engagement in, at least, three dimensions: the transdisciplinary nature of art, the expansion of selection committees and artists to underrepresented regions of the country, and the visibility of dissident identities. These transformations are part of a broader process of institutional reconsideration in most Latin American countries. For example, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Chile) has incorporated a strong feminist gaze to their collections and shows. The Museo Nacional de Artes (Mexico) has organized exhibitions and activities around topics of native culture (arts, food, etc.) to re-think the concept of modernity in Mexican institutions. Utilizing a transdisciplinary method that includes concepts from Art History, Sociology and Museum Studies, this paper will focus on how the changes made to the Palacio Nacional in Argentina participate in the configuration of social imaginaries that counterbalance dominant narratives, introducing other histories, different perspectives to an otherwise centered perspective.
Featured High Quality Spanish Sign Language Content in an Archeological Museum: What Do Deaf Children Think? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session María Asunción Arrufat Pérez De Zafra, Ainhoa Abásolo Elices
The inclusion of quality criteria in translation processes related to educational accessibility is of particular scientific interest. This paper presents the results of the intervention carried out in room 1 of the Archaeological and Ethnological Museum of Granada through the R&D research project Al-Musactra: Universal access to Andalusian museums through Experiences and research in educational contexts translation (B-TIC-352UGR18) and co-funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities and the European Union - NextGeneration EU in which the translation into sign language of the content of room 1 has been provided as a resource to which users had access through a classroom session that took place in the European Heritage Days 2021 addressed to a group of the Sagrada Familia Special Education School of Granada. The source text is a video of great terminological richness in which a guided tour takes place. The video corresponds to the prehistoric period of Granada and is conducted by the director of the museum. The translation process allowed us to deal with translation difficulties and offer quality linguistic solutions for the deaf community. An interactive methodology has been chosen to engage children's participation and promote their learning.
The Social Barometer of Museums of Catalonia: Results of the Test Phase View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Xavier Ulled, Pol Casals, Joaquina Bobes, Antoni Laporte
The Social Barometer of Museums (BSM) is a project that aims at becoming a basic tool for increasing awareness of museums’ public value. It seeks to show the benefits contributed by the museums to society, highlighting the positive impact they have on people’s individual and collective lives and showing the collaborative work they perform to meet current societal challenges. To achieve these objectives, the BSM needs to gather data that measure museum’s capacity to facilitate social impacts, that is, it must become a tool that generates evidence and numerical data that can provide a basis for communicating their work and contribute to improving museum management. In 2022, the Observatory of Audiences of Cultural Heritage of Catalonia implemented a test phase, with the goal of verifying and scaling application of the tool. This phase has focused on the quantitative analysis, whose results are presented. The quantitative analysis has used a self-assessment methodology in which 12 museums in different parts of Catalonia, with very different sizes and areas of specialisation, have voluntarily contributed information about the 35 indicators. This study also offers many examples of good museum practices. Counting and analysing museums’ social impact, first quantitatively, and, in the future, qualitatively, is a complex exercise. In this, it is pioneering the field in Spain and is the first that makes it possible to assess a series of actions that are essential for defining what a museum is and which are normally not included in the statistics.
A Co-production Framework for National Museums Liverpool View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Suzanne Mac Leod, Ranmalie Jayawardana
In this study we explore the creation of a co-production strategy for National Museums Liverpool, a publicly-funded organisation delivering the multi-million pound Waterfront Transformation Project with its local, national and international communities. The Waterfront Transformation Project builds on decades of collaboration to redevelop four sites - including the International Slavery Museum - and embed co-production the organisation's standard way of working going forward. To achieve this, colleagues have worked with researchers from the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries to develop a bespoke co-production framework to interrogate and transform NML's ways of working through a process of Action Research. Using the International Slavery Museum as a test site, the team have developed and applied the framework to scale up co-production from conception right through to governance, delivery and evaluation, with co-production partners. Through this collaborative effort, NML and RCMG colleagues consider lessons learned from this ongoing journey and the complexity of organisational change for its people, partners, systems and processes. We explore power and equity in a Capital project, and ask - how do the demands of public funding impact a museum's aspirations of public co-production?
