Staking Memory and Place Claims on Space and Meaning in the Life of a Mid lifer Museum (original) (raw)
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Crítica Museográfica de: Arte y Política. Conflictos y disyuntivas.
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Museum International, 2020
The definition of ‘museum’ has changed, though some prefer to cling to that of a hundred years ago. The tension between what a museum is and what it does will continue, because the relationships and discourses we build among objects, communities and spaces remain dynamic as those same elements transform. Highlighting certain voices from museology and queer theory, this article tells the brief history of the Museo Q in Colombia. This museum, recognised as such by national cultural authorities, has no walls or extensive collections. Thus, its architecture is sometimes temporal, sometimes itinerant, sometimes transmutable. Considering its particular relationship with time and space, this article imagines a museology in motion, a museology that values emotion, failure, contingency, and movement: a museology in motion for an alternative future.
In recent times, both among scholars and museum professionals, an increasing amount of attention has been paid to the long-neglected, but truly vast corpus of photographs existing in museums outside museum collections. These are used and perceived either as tools with different functions within the museum’s ‘ecosystem’, or items which ‘are just there’ (Edwards and Lien 2014). In the environment of Croatian institutions, these tendencies have manifested in two fields of academic and professional interest. More specifically, it has turned out that, in addition to lesser-known private collections, it is precisely this mass of orphaned photographs in museums that is often a bountiful supplement for the national photographic canon. On the other hand, these photographs are increasingly becoming a subject of interest in the context of perceiving the ‘epistemological potential’ (Caraffa 2011) of photographic ‘collections’/archives within the framework of scholarly disciplines relied on by individual museums. Via the same mechanism, they contribute to the reconstruction of the history of museums and prevailing institutional discourses and practices. On this occasion, I will reflect on a specific segment of ‘museum photography’, which is, so to speak, lowlier than ‘lowly’ in a museum (Crane 2020). The examples used match the definition of a snapshot by all their characteristics: subject matter banality, conventionality of expression, technical shortcomings, usage of simple equipment, and the anonymity of the author, probably a member of staff (Batchen 2008; Pollen 2020). Predominantly taken in a casual atmosphere, they eloquently point to social and emotional relations. At times in contradiction not only with the tone but also with the narrative of official recordings from the life of the museum, and preserved in the museum for sentimental reasons or by inertia of the heritage institution’s logic, they complete the picture of everyday museum life and institutional history.
Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change , 2021
In recent years a number of arguments have been made for the evolution of institutional critique into a new wave. The first of these arguments, which follows Chantal Mouffe's strategy of 'engagement', posits that the art museum has internalized the artistic critique previously levied against it, and enacts a form of self-critique (new institutionalism). The second argument adheres to the Autonomist Marxist strategy of 'exodus', and describes collectives that flee from the neoliberalized state institutional structure and draw on the tenets of movement-based aesthetics in order to self-institute their own alternative institutions (Gerald Raunig's 'instituent pratices'). Each of these strategies of resistance has its limitations. Instituent practices effectively wash their hands of state cultural institutions, leaving them to further devolve into the private sector unchecked, and, in the case of new institutionalism, the ability of the museum to reform itself from within is often severly compromised by the reality of how these institutions operate from within the hegemony of the neoliberal order. This chapter makes the argument that a further iteration of institutional critique-what I term 'interstitial critique' after Simon Critchley's radical political stragegy of opening interstitial distances in the state-has emerged in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. In an era of climate crisis, interstitial critique holds the museum to account for its complicity-through the receipt of corporate sponsorship-in perpetuating climate change, precarious working conditions, and ultimately, the white supremacist, colonial narratives that underscore these related grievances. It does so by infiltrating the museum with an anarchic force from below, a force whose ultimate goal is to liberate the museum from the nefarious influence of its corporate sponsors and reclaim its cultural commons for the public good.
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Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022
Este texto condensa algunas escenas de la historia de una relación compleja: la red de colaboración que se gesta entre distintos colectivos de vecin+s del barrio de Lavapiés y el Museo Reina Sofía desde 2018 hasta hoy. A partir de tres nombres propios, los de dos personas migrantes, Mame Mbaye y Mohammed Hossein, y el de la teóloga y activista Pepa Torres, se recorren distintos momentos y dimensiones de esta experiencia que cuestiona lo que se espera convencionalmente de un museo de arte, redefiniendo su implicación con el entorno más inmediato y los modos de habitarlo. Museum Network Situated Museum Lavapiés Collective Sensing Memory Activism Politics of Memory Situated Knowledges Ana Longoni Museo Situado: tres nombres propios y una red INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2
Liberating History: New Museography at the Casa Museo Quinta de Bolívar
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The hero’s house type of history museum faces the challenge of preserving architecture and artifacts related to a revered, often quasi-sacred cultural figure while proving relevance to a changing and diverse public. Temporary interventions into the space of the museum, for example in the form of contemporary art installations, can serve to expand what and who is represented in history, creating an atmosphere of openness that encourages visitors to see themselves as active agents in the creation of cultural heritage. Recent new museum practices at the Casa Museo Quinta de Bolívar, a former home of the South American independence leader Simón Bolívar in Bogotá, Colombia, illustrate the potential of creative intervention to open and reconstruct national history. Museum director Daniel Castro has collaborated with a wide range of civic institutions, schools, and universities to create programs allowing artists and others to re-vision the history of Colombian independence and the relationship of Bolívar to the present. This case study can help others both to evaluate the benefits and pitfalls of creative intervention as a practice and to think critically about ways to make history museums, in general, more inclusive.
Whose Barrio? Institutional Identity and Survival Tactics of El Museo del Barrio
The history and analysis of the development of El Museo del Barrio in New York City clarifies the part that community museums play in the experience of political marginalization. In 2009, El Museo underwent a multi-million dollar renovation. It now seeks to represent the culture of all of Latin Americans and to compete with mainstream museums in the area. However, since El Museo's original mission was to give a voice to the Puerto Rican and Latin American community in New York, the fact that its mandate is shifting towards global acceptance means that it must reevaluate its role in the community and the community's needs. This paper argues that El Museo performs an ongoing tactical process of responding to the community's needs. It suggests that the greatest threat to El Museo's professional development, now that it has initiated a dialogue with the mainstream, is a loss of authority brought about by forcing a reconsideration of the terms of its foundational identity.
HISTORY AND EDUCATION AS BASES FOR MUSEUM LEGITIMACY IN LATIN AMERICAN MUSEUMS: SOME COMMENTS FOR A DISCUSSION FROM A CRITICAL MUSEOLOGY POINT OF VIEW
The article introduces the concept of "critical museology" as a framework for the analysis of the social legitimacy of museums. Critical museology is seen as a theory that advocates the idea that traditional museology as well as one of its basic concepts-museality-is the product of the society in which is created i.e., it is defined by the social, political, and economic context where the museologist and the museum institutions are immersed. This approach could shed some light on the differences between museums of Latin America and museums of Europe and the United States. It also advocates the idea that museums should become spaces where, paraphrasing Marx and Engels: "all that is solid melts into the air all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind". CRITICAL MUSEOLOGY: A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Museology is a scientific discipline 2 that studies certain relationships between human beings and their environment and it entails the expression, valorization, and affirmation of various forms of identity; therefore it has a wide social significance. 3 Although museology deals in part with the inner workings (i.e., research, cataloging, registering, and exhibiting of objects) of museums, its scope transcends the walls of the museum: it studies the place and function of museums in society, their social, political and economic roots and their possible role in the improvement of society. The idea of critical museology is not new, it has been around since the late seventies in the Reinwardt Academy in the Netherlands and so far, it does not have specific doctrinal principles. 4 According to María del Mar Flórez Crespo, "The critical museology arises from the constant crisis of the concept of the museum as a space of interaction between the public and the collection". 5 This interaction comprehends the use of history and education in the building-(re)presentation and communication of a message that implies a certain notion of identity, culture, and nation as well as progress and science.