Seminar: “Cultural contestation in museums. Recoding the museum artifact as an exercise of emancipation”.
Lecture: “Museums as sites of cultural contestation.” (4 March)
Introduction
The relationship between museum and education is an intimate one. While museums debuted in the modern cultural landscape as governmental devices encoding official cultural representations and validating specific knowledges, and thus align with a normative and monolithic view of education, recent research argues for the need to acknowledge museums’ non neutrality, in order to challenge its given narratives and structure of authority (Brulon Soares, Leshchenko, 2018). Museum representations, in fact, can be remapped into a cartography which helps to retrace and describe the power relationships implied in any act of knowledge production and transmission. By recognizing how museums are caught in this complex political and epistemic entanglement, it may also be possible to put into question whose voice(s) they represent and celebrate and which ones, on the contrary are held hostage of the culture of silence (Freire, 1996).
Guest Lecture
Moving from this perspective, Peter Mayo’s seminal research addresses the museum as a potential site of cultural politics and civic education. He investigates the chance to acknowledge museum artifacts as political texts, as they – just like the curriculum – are deeply implicated in the promulgation of power/knowledge relations. In other words, they are not unbiased and embed precise choices regarding whose voices are celebrated and whose ones are instead overlooked, legitimating certain representations at the expense of others. Hence, museums and curricula share a common crucial role in shaping what is regarded as the official knowledge. However, the conclusion of such reasoning is not that museum artifacts (and curricula) are bound to a given structure of domination and code of representational control. As neither the museum object nor the curriculum is monolithic, it is possible to enable specific representations allowing for spaces of contestation. These would be sites and times to reflect upon questions regarding dominant and subaltern cultures; forgotten and represented histories; projected and marginalized images; listened and silenced voices. Through his work, Mayo followed this trajectory in a series of empirical investigations involving several museums, such as the Malta Maritime Museum, in order to develop a museum decolonising methodology (Borg et al., 2013): i.e., a methodology aimed at reviewing the reality portrayed in museums, confronting the master narrative with the overlooked histories, and ultimately setting a dialogue with the wider community. As museum objects may be remade to embroider specific forms of peripheral knowledge, museums come as sites to resist and to challenge the authority over naming reality.
Discussion
Building on Mayo’s understanding of museum artifacts as political texts, we will discuss the potential of digital technologies in sustaining acts of emancipations through art and museums. For instance, such technologies may be used to engage collectively and democratically in the process of representation in museums. Through the examination of some case studies (e.g., The Deep Viewpoints web app by the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and The Uncertain Space VR Museum of the University of Bristol) we will reflect upon this potential of digital tools. As museums (as well as other cultural institutions, like schools) act through a de-contextualization of artifacts and notions, always implying an exercise of cultural selection, the use of technology may be aimed to capture the plurality of histories and putting them back into the spotlight. Moreover, as the case studies clearly demonstrate, such process can also be collective and based on co-creation, providing the chance for the community to engage in the pedagogy of questioning. The act of welcoming this polyphony of voices into the institutions, resonates with the desire to avoid refusing such spaces (Mouffe, 2013) and rather interrogating them to make them sites of political struggle, recognizing any hegemony as transient and any political configuration as alterable.
