Dynamic Forces
Old Instruments, New Visions: A Collaborative View to the Traditional Plucked Chordophones in the Museu Nacional da Música Collections
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Felipe Barão
This paper outlines and explores the collaborative process among Museu Nacional da Música (MNM), musicians, and luthiers/restorers, which I have been mediating during my PhD in Ethnomusicology at Aveiro University. This collaboration aimed to integrate different specialized knowledge in the cataloguing and description of musical instruments and their social lives that are part of the museum collections, with a focus on plucked chordophones identified as 'Portuguese traditional instruments'. This strategy is based on the criticism by Lavine and Karp (1991) in favour of including the narratives of the communities of origin and practice in museological curation. The authors suggest a disengagement from museological practices that valorised museums as 'temples' of artifacts legitimized by supposed ethnographic authority, often reflecting the current political power. Instead, they propose the notion of the museum as a 'forum' for dynamic interaction promoting diversity of perspectives and acting as an agent of change. The relocation of MNM to the Palácio Nacional de Mafra in 2024 is providing an opportunity to reformulate its exhibition discourses through dynamic interaction with different actors (musicians, luthiers/restorers, origin communities). This dynamic is expanding the knowledge of each musical instrument, previously confined to organology and territorial demarcation, to include: (i) performance techniques, performance contexts, construction techniques, and repertoire, in order to enhance the museum's educational dimension; (ii) the stories of musician performers and musical groups related to these instruments, to contribute to the social memory of the represented communities; and (iii) discussions on other curatorial narratives.
Co-curation in the Museum: Opening-up Collections with a Sense of Serendipity and Purpose
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jon Stam
Opening up collections and fostering inclusive curatorial practices is a crucial part of reshaping power dynamics between museums and their public. Yet, when it comes to hands-on collection work inside museums—such as researching catalogues, arranging displays, and developing interpretive stories—these processes largely remain behind the scenes, outside the influence of visitors. A core challenge in supporting more people to search, find, and share their meaningful connections with museum collections is that these collections are vast, complex, and contain significant archival gaps. This makes grasping the structure and contents of a museum’s holdings a daunting task, even for dedicated experts. This paper presents research on how collection work can be put into action on the museum floor by designing co-curational interfaces that utilise the networked potential of digital collections. Drawing insights from Searcher, a project that experiments with the entire collection data of three European museums, we share novel methods for aiding users in navigating large collections and sharing discoveries in public displays. Centered on the concept of serendipity, these methods pair computational techniques that uncover dense interconnections between collection objects with people's intuitive and interpretive power to identify what is personally meaningful. In doing so, more people are invited to exert their creative energy with collections, bringing in new and diverse perspectives into the museum. Given that the museum's frontend grants access to only a fraction of its holdings through fixed displays and long-serving narratives, we argue for more open circulation of search, stories, and sharing within museums.
Black Heritage in the National Register: The Williams Avenue YWCA in Portland, Oregon
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Arroyo
This paper examines the nomination of the Williams Avenue YWCA in Portland, Oregon, in the National Register of Historic Places as a crucial event in recognizing and preserving Black heritage within American national history. Our analytical framework combines Black geography (Summers 2019; Watkins 2013) and multilevel governance theory (MLG) (Vogel 2007) to examine documents used for the nomination process of this community museum. How is its historic significance for Black communities framed? What connects the different levels of government and other actors in the process? To answer these questions we analyze two key primary documents for the National Register nomination process: the Multiple Property Document (MPD) African American Resources in Portland Oregon, from 1851 to 1973 (Galbraith et al. 2020) and the Registration Form Williams Avenue YWCA (Davis and Ewers 2019). MPDs and Registration Forms are key sources of information and have been underutilized in the academic context, relegating them to a mere bureaucratic function despite the wealth of information they collected about the representation of the ethnic and racial diversity of American history and its influence on the National Register (Hanson et al. 2022). We unpack the historical significance of the Williams, illustrating its multifaceted role in Portland's African American community and emphasizing the role of various private and public actors in the nomination process. This analysis reveals that cities play a crucial role in protecting local history and highlights the importance of nurturing connections between cities and other levels of government.
