Rethink

As an institution of preservation and study, should the museum be concerned solely with the history of the past, or should it also make itself directly responsible for the histories yet to come? Is it possible to rethink a museum, and specifically an ethno-anthropological museum, so as to become a responsibly contemporary museum?

The extraordinary articulation and stratification of works and documents preserved by the Museum of Civilizations arises from the coexistence of different disciplines and origins, all with common foundations in the positivist, classificatory and Eurocentric cultures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The museum recognizes the urgent needs involved in the care and use of these collections, and from this, for updating of its disciplinary statutes and public functions. Given these needs, the museum has begun a systemic reflection on its identities, both present and past, probing into how a contemporary anthropological museum can best operate, and undertaking inquiring and self-critical actions aimed at accessibility, which will involve interconnected practices of care, acceptance of responsibilities, sharing and restitution.

From a multiplicity of lines of historical and theoretical research and artistic and intellectual practice involving museums in general, both nationally and internationally, anthropological museums emerge as critical. One of the open questions is how the separation and classification of cultures has contributed to the identification of categories, such as “primitive” and “otherness,” functional in unbalanced narratives and exclusionary versus inclusive knowledge. To avoid persisting along such lines of inequality – not perceived by some audiences but acutely felt by others – the contemporary anthropological museum can aim to:

• center its actions on free and increased access to its archives and plural support for research and practices aimed at studying and rewriting the biographies of each individual object and document, starting from the rigorous reconstruction of provenances;
• activate projects that address and deconstruct the histories and dynamics involved in the founding of the museum’s collections, renouncing one-sided interpretations that perpetuate the histories and dynamics of removal;
• distinguish the meanings of the terms “post-colonial,” “de-colonial,” and “anti-colonial”, identifying the relative spheres of action;distinguere tra le opzioni a cui si richiamano i differenti termini e ambiti di azione “post-coloniale”, “de-coloniale”, “anti-coloniale”;
• on this basis, to interconnect research and pedagogy, moving towards positional but polycentric and intersectional institutional behaviors, in which taking a stand means making oneself a conscious co-author of museum accessibility, together with the various communities.

In the more general context of the Great Project for Cultural Heritage supported by the Ministry of Culture and with the coordination of the General Directorate for Museums, the Museum of Civilizations is therefore initiating numerous “worksites”: upgrading not only its physical layout but also its methodologies as it gradually reopens all of its sections, many of which have been only partially operational or even closed for decades. For some collections – such as those of colonial origin – these approaches have triggered entry into shared reflections on the appropriateness and modalities of possible museum formats. The “civilizations” to which the Museum of Civilizations is dedicated are therefore not only historical but also those of our present, and those yet to be realized, together with our audiences.

October 26, 2022 marked the opening of the first museum worksite, in the symmetrically opposing entrances of the Palace of Sciences (Piazza Guglielmo Marconi 14), and the Palace of Folk Arts and Traditions (Piazza Guglielmo Marconi 8). Both entrances have been reconfigured as a historical-critical introduction to the museum, narrating its different incarnations and aiming to answer the public’s question, “What museum am I about to visit?” Periodically we will rearrange the two entrances, with each installation delving further into how the museum carries out its research, and the tools for sharing at disposal in its various departments and sections (inventories, index cards, labels, explanatory texts, plans and maps, journals and publications, educational media), thus also revealing how some characteristics of cataloguing are common to the different collections. Specifically, we will be analyzing how the collections are characterized by their different provenances, and the relationships between the uniqueness and seriality of the artifacts, and how this influences their interpretation. We will be documenting some of the personalities and events from which the collections originate, such as the very early multi-disciplinarity of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s Wunderkammer; the role of major encyclopedic exhibitions such as the 1911 Exhibition of Italian Ethnography and theUniversal Exhibition of Rome (EUR) of 1942; the collecting activities of 19th-20th century figures such as Evan G. Gorga and the field research of explorers and anthropologists of various generations and formations, whose archives and collections have come down to us, including those of Enrico H. Giglioli, Lamberto Loria, Luigi Pigorini, Annabella Rossi and Giuseppe Tucci.

The rethinking of museum methodologies, which takes the form of a progressive rearrangement of the collections and the concomitant rewriting of their interpretive apparatuses, will help to transform the museum from a reassuring custodian of past civilizations into a critical agent of civilizations, present and future: into a worksite inviting participation from different audiences, and day-by-day recalibrating its own tools and programming.