unplace: a museum without a place (original) (raw)

Unapologetically Political and Sociological: Developing and Renewing Museum Spaces

Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2018

Abstract:In the context of Malta’s Valletta 2018 commitment to maximise, popularise and ‘Europeanise’ its cultural spaces, this paper examines the role of national museum spaces in the contemporary era of cultural hybridity, liquidity (Bauman, 2000) and mobility. Departing from a critical pedagogical framework, the paper examines how ‘national’ cultural sites which have historically served to reproduce hegemonic ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991), can be genuinely transformed into ‘ecologies of cognition’ (de Sousa Santos 2006). These are dynamic public spaces where cognitive justice and democracy are affirmed. The role of curators as mediators of knowledges and as adult educators within mainly state-sponsored institutions will be interrogated. Also problematised is the notion of ‘national’ and ‘permanent collection’ in a Maltese context which is dynamic and cosmopolitan. In the final analysis, this paper will contribute to the ongoing search for greater participation of the Mal...

Invisible Museums and Multiple Utopias

Museological Review 17, 2012

In Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, the traveller Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan tales of the various cities of his empire, which the Khan himself will never visit. In this paper we draw a model from Calvino's novel to explore those aspects of museum experience that are almost invisible to museum professionals. Drawing on empirical research, we argue that, as experienced by visitors, any one museum is not single but a multiplicity of deeply personal, and largely invisible, utopian spaces. At the end of Invisible Cities, Polo talks of the 'infernal city', the antithesis of utopia. Escaping this city is a matter of giving space to things that are not of the inferno, to invisible utopias, that they might endure. We argue that the museum is a place where these invisible utopias may be given space; and that the challenge for museum professionals is to guard these invisible museums that they-like the Khan-will never see.

The transient museum: Or a vision of the not-yet-here

Cultural Dynamics, 2020

This essay forwards the idea of the transient museum, a theoretical and utopian project aimed at dismantling the visual logics that support the contemporary art museum. Beginning from the premise that such museums are predicated upon colonial and capitalist visual logics, the transient museum imagines ways of being in but not of the contemporary art museum and the economies of circulation it engenders. Its tactics engage visuality but, equally, a politics of the body and of movement. As such, Gwyneth Shanks frames two ways of performing the transient museum, against acquisition and an aesthetics of concealment, analyzing highly performative artworks by artists Rafa Esparza and Nari Ward to explain these categories. She argues that the transient museum names ever-accumulating forces of global and historical crisis-forces to which neither the museum nor contemporary art are immune-as a practice of enacting hope and remaking the contours of contemporary art.

Staking Memory and Place Claims on Space and Meaning in the Life of a Mid lifer Museum

Banwaan The Philuppine Journal of Folklore, 2022

The essay looks into how countermapping was explored as both research and artistic strategy by the art collective called Plataporma as they were invited to engage with the Lopez Memorial Museum and Library's 50th anniversary exhibition in 2010. Their project remains accessible as hyperextensions, a blog they crafted in response to the curatorial prompt to work with the institutional archive and to look past the museum's walls, beyond its mere location (thus the harking back to Pasay from Pasig). In the process, Plataporma helped surface at least traces of what we curators would call 'civilian'/non-artworld perspectives of the workings of an institution that positions itself within the frame of public service. Documentation of the project may be found on http://hyperextensions.blogspot.com/p/project.html.

Ruined museums: Exploring post- foundational spatiality

ephemera, 2021

The paper turns to interdisciplinary museum and ruin studies with the objective to think about space, politics and the political. Situated in a post-foundational understanding of political difference, which roughly distinguishes between 'politics' as the realm of standardized, normalized positions and procedures of power, and 'the political' as the irreducible antagonistic dimension of political life, we explore the mutual interpenetrations as well as political divergences between ruins and museums. For this purpose, we consider 'museumification' as a socio-spatial process that tends to inscribe an order of 'politics', whereas we view 'ruination' as a potentiality to create socio-material voids, which may (re)activate moments of 'the political'. In this framework, the museum signifies an attempt to conserve, exhibit and transmit selected narratives of the past, potentially evoking a topographical notion of space, whereas the ruin dislocates, ambiguates and dismantles orders of the past, possibly leading to a topological understanding of space. After revisiting accounts of the museumification of ruins, we argue that the latter can be understood as a process which disambiguates, commodifies and thus depoliticizes ruins as polyvalent matters. We introduce the 'ruination of museums' as a material, discursive and affective process, bringing attention to the interrelated and conflicting modes of absence and presence in time and space. In 'ruined museums', museums and ruins coalesce into spatio-temporal tropes that attend to complex and complicated narratives of time, space and history. In 'ruined museums', the ossified politics of place(s) become mobilized via 'the political'. To illustrate this conceptual proposition of the 'ruined museum', we engage with the 9/11 memorial museum Reflecting Absence in New York City. Through this empirical case, we hope to advance a post-foundational understanding of space that acknowledges (urban) public places as inhabited and politicized by the agency, materiality and spatiality of ghostly presences.

On Museums in a Postmodern World

Daedalus, 2008

In the spirit of trying to make our aca-demic research more socially engaging, my colleagues and I have supported the construction or rehabilitation of small, community-based archaeological and ethnographic museums in Bolivia and Peru over the last twenty years. These ...

Forgotten Worlds: Cultivating Museums Otherwise

Stedelijk Studies, 2023

This open access article co-authored with Asia Komarova of The Outsiders explores the constant transformation of museums in relation to environmental concerns, with a focus on the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills - a new mobile museum that aims to connect people with a rapidly developing urban area in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The essay forms part of a special issue of Stedelijk Studies on the concept of 'museum-ing'. https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/forgotten-worlds-cultivating-museums/

The World Between Us - Contemporary Museums as Public Spaces. Case Study: EMMA

This thesis looks at the term "public space" and its relation to contemporary museums, using the case study of EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art. At a time when the relevance of museums to societies is being questioned, this research looks at the public nature of museums in an attempt to examin why they are under scrutiny. The aim of the research is to understand what the term public work (Fin. Yleisötyö), used by Finnish museums of today, means and could mean if the term would correlate with the original signification of the word "public". By dissecting and analysing both the words "public" and "space", it outlines a theoretical narrative of the term in order to apply it to the case study and to museums more broadly. By bringing together museums and public spaces, the research aims to highlight and question the mission and purpose of contemporary museums while outlining possibilities for their relevance in this and future moments.