Centering Inclusion
Inclusive Way Museum: Confluences of Tactical Museology and Artistic Practices of Emergency View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andreina Fuentes, Gerardo A. Zavarce
This paper explores the experiences of the Inclusive Way Museum, whose collection and exhibition deployment is focused on experimenting, documenting, and creating archives of artistic practices aimed at generating alternatives to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). These experiences form what the researcher Reinaldo Laddaga describes as Estéticas de la Emergencia (Art of Emergency) (2006), cultural ecologies or experimental communities, whose forms of organization, production, and communication are linked to contemporary strategies of participation, the construction of democratic alternatives, and the development of new narratives and the design of emergent memory forms.
The Democratic Potential of the Handling Collection
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Helen Arfvidsson
Imagine you enter a museum exhibition and instead of merely observing the objects from behind the glass and reading about them on the signs, you are also invited to pick them up, touch them, sense them, and play with them. How does that change your museum experience? This paper explores how the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden are rethinking the democratic potential of our handling/educational collection. A collection with a different set of regulations which enables not only a potential of using multiple senses, but also enables us to ask new questions about established museum practices that produce and reproduce divisions and hierarchies not simply between objects, but also between people and cultures. The democratic potential of the handling collection can help us questions these frames and categories, thus, is also part of the larger purpose of transforming Ethnographic/World Cultures museums into more inclusive spaces by engaging audiences differently. At the center of this research is a case study from the ongoing exhibition “Democracy does not exist – we make it!”. It focuses on how school visits are transformed when the students are encouraged to touch and explore the objects in unexpected ways.
Holder of Battered Memories - Suitcase as a Metaphor for the (Lost) Mobile Body: A Study of the Way the Absent Body is Prepresented in Museums View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elizabeth Carnegie, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz
Representations of migrations, deportations and displacements abound in public and museum exhibits, in contexts ranging from heroic journeys to suffering and victimhood. We work with the notion of the mobile body and the way in which the battered suitcase symbolically represents displacement, loss, change and bodily decay. Suitcases are containers for and of memories, and their decay represents and displaces passing time and the fragility of bodies moving through space and history. Their very materiality conveys embodied experience and intangibility of memory, and the decay of their often-organic form (leather, cardboard) mirrors the embodied experiences of their owners. In our paper we are particularly concerned with the ways in which suitcases are used within museums and heritage spaces, narratives of involuntary or forced migration, and the identity markers that such suitcases carry in terms of labels – both real and symbolic - as documents representing the individual, collective and body politic within the recent political past. Smith (2006: 500) described museums as sites constructed to show “the cargo of the past on consignment into the future” and we argue that suitcases simultaneously hide and showcase the past, enabling its present-day remembering and memorialising. Drawing on fieldwork from museums and public spaces, we consider how suitcases themselves are consigned to the "attic of memory". As museum displays or as piles of discarded remnants, offered as vestiges, as witnesses to human loss and suffering at death camps such as Auschwitz. Smith, C. S. (2006) The future of the museum. Oxford: Blackwell
