The sacred in the prism of museology (original) (raw)
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Museology and the Sacred. Materials for a discussion. (Ed. François Mairesse), 2018
Religion in Museums: Euthanized Sacredness, in the Beholder’s Eye, or a Multi-Tool for Shifting Needs? Three suggested models to discuss how museums affect sacredness (2018) MUSEOLOGY AND THE SACRED - MATERIALS FOR A DISCUSSION Papers from the ICOFOM 41th symposium held in Tehran (Iran), 15-19 October 2018, 145-148. Ed. François Mairesse Religion in museums: Euthanized sacredness, in the beholder’s eye, or a multi-tool for shifting needs? Three suggested models to discuss how museums affect sacredness. Abstract for paper for the ICOFOM 41st symposium Museology and the sacred Tehran, 15-19 October 2018. Aimed for the analysis plan Museality-heritage-sacred. by Helena Wangefelt Ström, PhD candidate in Museology, Umeå University (Sweden). helena.wangefelt.strom@umu.se What happens when religion in the shape of objects imbued with religious meaning is transformed into cultural heritage? What values are added, what are lost, and who is the performing agent? These questions concern what museums do to objects connected to religion, calling for a meditated use of terms such as holy, sacred, religious, and spiritual (all employed in recent research and policy documents by, for example, UNESCO, while in many cases as interchangeable). This paper suggests three models to understand the processes of heritagisation of religion and the factors and agents involved, starting from a historical background in European, in particular Italian, Early Modernity. A frequently used scholarly model depicts the museum as a killing of previous identities, and the objects as provided with entirely new identities, and lives, as museum objects. This view brings on dramatic effects for sacred objects, how they are handled and narrated in the museum, and possibly on how they are viewed by the visitors. The use or not of information signs before sacred objects in museums is an aspect on this matter. The second model is the hybrid identity, where a museum object can be said to possess two authentic identities simultaneously, depending on the views and beliefs of the beholder: authentic sacredness, or authentic art object and evidence of history. This view may fit well with the focus on the individual in our time. The third model presented is based on the two previous ones, and suggests a hybridity not only in identities or living/dead, but defined by the uses of the objects. Even musealized objects can, as in the cases of religious treasuries or of certain religious images in museums, shift identity between museum object, object of devotion (to be carried in processions or used in rituals), legitimization symbol (bishops’ ordinations etc), and, historically, as a monetary reserve to be sold if needed. The identity of the object shifts, also in practice of being looked at behind glass or being used and touched, depending on the use currently applied to it. A distinction between cultual use and cultural use is relevant for this model. I argue that these different approaches to sacred objects in museum pose different museological challenges and possibilities, and also ascribes different agencies to museum staff as well as to the visitors.
The sacred in museums, the museology of the sacred — the spirituality of indigenous people
ICOFOM study series, 2019
Lo sagrado en el museo, la museología de lo sagrado-la espiritualidad indígena La discusión de lo sagrado en el museo puede tomarse por diferentes retos. En el artículo presentamos la espiritualidad indígena y cómo influye el trabajo en el museo, especialmente de la curaduría. Los argumentos se mantienen en acciones de colaboración y en los conocimientos indígenas en Brasil. Mantenemos que los museos son lugares sagrados, porque los objetos indígenas son sagrados y la parte sagrada hace parte de la vida de los pueblos indígenas. Los objetos musealizados indígenas sí mismo transportan las energías ancestrales, mientras evocan comunicación con los espíritus. Es una visión que pone los espíritos como curadores del museo, lo que requiere nuevos aprendizajes para nuevas situaciones museológicas. Palabras claves: Museología y lo sagrado, Espiritualida indígena, Curadoria y lo sagrado, Proceso colaborativo.
Considerations in Relation to the Museography for Objects of a Religious Nature
2013
T he modern museum is a creation of the Enlightenment, closely related to the illusion of dominating and creating order in the world as well as closely linked to secularisation: therefore it is not by chance even its architectural typology recalls, from its very origins, a non-religious temple. 1 From time immemorial, the eradication of objects from their original context (in our case: churches, tombs, altars...) will alter its characteristics: thus becoming aesthetic, historical, artistic and ethnographic proof, which are utilised by researchers as transformed objects. Afterwards, these objects have been continuously utilised, within the museum context, to celebrate nations or social classes, for education or indoctrination, to promote behaviour or opinions and to exercise a social control.
Olms (open access), 2022
Museums are receiving currently a lot of public attention with regard to the material objects they host, and the historical and contemporary handling of these objects. There are global public debates about the origins, paths, and futures of museum things. Since at least 2018, with the report on the restitution of African cultural heritage, which Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy presented to the French president, the legitimacy of objects from colonial contexts in museums and collections in the global north has been widely debated. Furthermore, disciplines within cultural studies, including the study of religions, have taken a material turn, and now focus on the material, and thus also on museum things. This has brought the material dimension of religion into the focus of research in various disciplines. Studying materiality can thus open a pathway for potential critique of established patterns in research, historiography, and society, widening our perspective. It was against this multifaceted background that the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Religion (ZIR) and the Museum of Religions (Religionskundliche Sammlung) of the Philipps-University Marburg, the Museum of the Frankfurt Cathedral, and the GRASSI Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig formed a research network on the topic of Dynamics of Religious Things in Museums (Dynamiken religiöser Dinge im Museum, REDIM in short). This cooperative alliance, under the leadership of the ZIR, is based on the common interest in the relevance of religious materials in museums for social transformation, and in how social processes are reflected by material things.
2019
Exodus Stations questions heritage, museums of material culture and their history through the perspective of contemporary art. It organises research and artistic projects that are set in natural history, history, ethnology and cultural artefact museums. Contemporary artists are invited to research in the photographic archives of these museums and follow the history of these museums and the way in which they contributed to the production of knowledge. The projects results from collaborations between artists, museum curators and other researchers. Starting from the visual archives and the way in which the objects and the history has been represented, the artists discover how historic objects have been politicised, valued, stored, transmitted and instrumentalised. The project is meant like a critical tool of self-evaluation of institutional policy, cultural and historic narrative, public education. The results of the projects are directed to museum audience, to specialised and non-specialised public. The artistic output will be shown in the museums (installations, screenings, talks, workshops) and aims to stimulate the critical reception of history and its objects. They provoke the viewer to find alternative ways in which history can be read and interpreted. Many of these installations result in devices that are implemented permanently or temporary in the museums and represent new display structures. Each project is also issuing a small publication. A theoretical edited volume is in preparation. In order to follow these intricate histories, EXODUS STATIONS proposes in each of these specific museums a case-study: joint researches where artists and museum’s curators affiliate their methodologies of work. Each case study is developed in the photographic archives of these museums and diffuses its results on a triple platform: exhibition, symposium and a small publication. Following the phase of artistic residences and research in the archives, the artists show the results of their work in an exhibition – which is included as a temporary exhibition in the museums that have been scrutinised. The small publication which accompanies the case-study aims to extract the essential questions of the research, to present excerpts of the museum’s archival material (some of it never published before) and present succinctly the artistic approach. Along with the temporary exhibition, the publication is available in the museum’s shop. In this way, these new layers of interpretation are added both to the collection items and to the existent museologic display system – and made available to the museum’s regular audience. The specificity of this project is the fact that the museum collections under examination blend material that has been collected, presented or valued either as artistic material and/or as ethnologic material – depending on various changing factors. The case-studies in these mixed collections, aim to trace the history of these fluctuating classifications and to determine the politics behind these various conjunctures of collecting – that determined the changing identity and patrimonial value of the objects. Under focus are mainly collections which have been initiated in colonial times, but also more recent collections – either from the time of Independence movements or from post-colonial contexts. Nevertheless the project is not only bound to a colonial context, but investigates also other mixed ethnologic-artistic collections which have been founded in times of political turmoil or authoritarian regimes and follows their political statement. The material under research are (mainly) visual or written sources on the history of the collections and their various forms of being exhibited: we compare early photographs that depict the images in their original context with more recent ones, shot along the object’s trading and collecting parcourse. We investigate institutional policy and cultural questions from founding texts or archival documents: images of their various display forms in time, images from the various institutions that hosted them, images that help us reconstitute founding histories of the museums and the original agendas of their founders – which themselves reflect on the collection’s identity, self-representation strategies and larger historical mentality. The project turns around issues of representation related to museology – in other words on systems of display of information and their cultural and philosophical significance at different moments in historic time. While watching various representations in time of the same objects or different ways of photographing and exhibiting the same collections, we become aware of changing ideologic frameworks and of cultural politics, of shifting scientific awareness of cultural difference, of influential personal visions and of the immense load of correlated information that every objects carries within its visible carcass. We learn also about the museum as an archive that at the same time hides and safeguards information and about the political power of visual techniques of occulting or oscillating information. Similar to the artistic practices that are part of this project and punctually intervene on specific subjects, museums – as ambivalent spaces of exotization and approximation – framing systems. They can be seen as complex dispositives that make possible a re-connotation or a partial re-invention of history. This project – devoted to the representation of patrimonial objects and to their various contexts of meaning and belonging – is mainly an exercise of methodologies. It aims to develop some techniques of analysis and display which are considered innovatory as they are the outcome of conceptual’s art own of understanding and making visible the meaning of objects. Working on a visual level (in the sense of transmitting information to the museum’s audience in a visual way) the project aims to identify methods and approaches with which conceptual art usually operates and that can be applied to critical museology. A final exhibition and publication will go beyond the information extracted from these museums’ case-studies and will be devoted to the display of these methods of distilling, interpreting and making visible to the large audience layers of critical information that surround the convoluted history of objects. This project is embedded in my research period at Collège d’études Mondiales, FMSH in Paris and its generous support.
Another history of museums: from the discourse to the museum-piece
Anais do Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material, 2013
The history of museums could get inspired on the procedures of material studies and of Anthropology in order to take a new stand and move away from the institutional approach and consider the approach of objects traditionally labelled as museum objects. The so-called "museum pieces" are supposed to have a number of characteristics, particularly some great historical and artistic qualities, sometimes an heritage quality, but above all the ability to make "friends" around the community or around the world. In all these respects, it is proposed here a number of research procedures that may supplement or enrich the directions usually assigned to the history of institutions.