Workshops

Aimed at supporting the museum community, my workshops are structured as laboratories during which a variety of activities, lectures, and group work are tailored to address specific issues or themes. Such workshops are suitable for museum professionals working with ethnographic, folk, and non-Western art collections.

The objective is not only to familiarise staff and professionals with current arguments and concerns, but to find practical solutions specific to individual institutions.

Such workshops are conceived as a way to promote and enhance the value of existing collections on the bases of their strengths. This has the aim of showing the collections’ current relevance, which in turn aims at encouraging social participation in museum activities that can generate new economic revenues and a more prominent public profile.

The partially experimental nature of these encounters will hopefully generate sufficient interest and positive feedback that may require follow up sessions tailored on the bases of the results of initial sessions. For example, if successful, a workshop on intangible cultural heritage may be followed by a second session in which ideas explored among professionals may be put in practice with the involvement of community members.

Feel free to browse among the examples listed here below to have an idea of some of the topic that we may cover:

1 Education and Interpretation

Museums’ educational aims are based on the type of knowledge produced and shared through the institutions’ apparatuses (e.g. conferences, round tables, book launches), didactic programs (e.g. classes, guided tours, children’s workshops). Research around collections, objects and displays are all underpinned by the fundamental responsibilities that institutions have towards their diverse publics, their sponsors, and source communities. In this workshop we analyse texts, information panels, marketing materials, captions, and educational material (booklets, guides etc.) in order to address ethical issues related to cultural sensitivities, specialised languages, and accessibility.

We will interrogate concepts such as specialist authority, objectivity, and positionality in order to offer and explore a broad range of perspectives that may tune educational and interpretative material in with democratic processes of cooperativeness, decolonisation, and social integration of different constituencies from the full social spectrum.

Objectives:

To expose museum professionals to cultural sensitivities and realities
To alert museum professionals about current themes related to museum ethics
To encourage museum professional to reflect on issues of moral nature and cultural difference
To use concepts such as authority, objectivity, knowledge, narration, and ethics to discuss successes and challenges of museum practice

Aims:

To revitalise exhibition techniques with respect to source communities’ cultural values
To align museum techniques with global practice
To promote museums as points of cultural encounter and active centres of knowledge production, and social integration
To re-evaluate museum collections in light of contemporary social changes, transnational and global processes

2: Representations and Perceptions

The never resolved problem of cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender representations here is addressed through concrete examples from the museum exhibitions and displays. The critical approach adopted here requires a reflexive process that involves all museum professionals’ involvement with case studies. The workshop will revolve around theories and methods of representation, the idea of the ‘the Other’, stereotypes, prototypes, and archetypes, analysis of museum narratives and the use of metaphor, metonymy, in curatorship and exhibition techniques.

Objectives:

To bring to the attention of museum professionals implicit biases in the existing displays, information, and captions
To reflect on the assumptions about cultural and other forms of difference that underpin museum-produced knowledge
To analyse what displays are not telling the public
To promote awareness of the partiality of narrative structures related to multiple axes of difference

Aims:

To eliminate implicit biases
To include in museum displays and techniques multiple axes of difference
To provide new interpretative tools that reflect diversity and difference
To tease out of collections, objects and displays new and innovative narratives

3 Intangible Cultural Heritage

Museums are repositories of objects and images. Recent engagement with sources communities have revealed the central role that intangible (oral) traditions have for contextual interpretations of the material. Intangible cultural property here will be examined in a variety of manifestations: from the direct engagement with objects through offerings and prayers, to ceremonies and visits to collections, audio-visual material related to objects and collections, and also educational programmes in which the aural aspects (e.g. music, explanations, storytelling, demonstrations etc.) take central place.

The workshop will also partially cover the opening of storage facilities to source communities to enrich and enhance our understanding of objects and their histories, and to allow different constituencies to become active participants in museum work.

Objectives:

To address the absence of oral and intangible heritage in museum displays and educational programmes
To raise consciousness among museum professionals about the cultural significance of performance, dancing, storytelling and traditional knowledge in complementing what can be known of objects within the displays
To make full use of the available sources stored in the museum
To support a holistic perspective on museological approaches to objects

Aims:

To encourage synergies between material and immaterial cultural heritage
To invite source communities to actively contribute to the vibrancy of museum life
To establish connections between objects and audio-visual material
To support research and data collection and analysis in the area of intangible cultural heritage