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Home 9 Rearrange

Rearrange

Rearranging the collections of a contemporary ethno-anthropological museum entails sharing and reflective reconsideration of the museum’s history, research and pedagogical methodologies. Rearranging means bringing to the surface the interpretations that, over the decades, the museum has given to a patrimony amounting to many thousands of objects. The contexts of these materials need reconstruction, and their provenances must be rigorously traced, considering how the activities of study, archiving, cataloguing, display and sharing have been tied into past systems of thought and cultural expression, for example those of the late 19th century based on a supposed centrality, and therefore a historical predominance, of European vis-à-vis other cultures.

The rearrangement of the Museum of Civilizations collections therefore demands the development of new connections between the institution’s own scientific staff and a plurality of external professionals and testimonies. To recover relationships with the original contexts of our ethnographic objects, for example, we need to agree on new relationships with the communities that produced them, also fully informing the public on how the objects in the showcases have been decontextualized with respect to their original identities, and bringing about the re-emergence and reaffirmation of their original subjectivity: the complexes of memories, symbolic values, social and ritual functions dissociated from them at the moment they were brought into the collections. At times, retooling means repairing a relationship with the contemporary representatives of the cultures that lost these works, considering that some materials would have entered the museum’s heritage not only through discovery or legitimate purchase, but also through embezzlement or exercise of asymmetrical powers. Indeed, in some cases it is these historical events that need reconstruction and narration, through museum mediation. Moreover, rehousing means sharing all interdisciplinary knowledge – artistic, scientific, social and historical – and involving all the personalities and communities that these collections embody, and thus bringing their many legacies into dialogue with our equally multiple contemporary sensibilities.

In synergy with the rethinking of museum methodologies, the gradual rearrangement of collections and the concomitant rewriting of their interpretive apparatuses can help transform the museum from a reassuring custodian of past civilizations into a critical agent of civilizations, present and to come: into a worksite open to different audiences, recalibrating its instruments and retargeting its programming, day by day.

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