A stimulating forum: Museums Association 2005

Here's an article I wrote for Bermuda Maritime Museum's members' magazine MariTimes 2005 Vol.18 No.2

Every year, the Museums Association holds its major conference, one of the world’s largest and most important gatherings of museum and heritage professionals. Thanks to BMM’s sponsorship of my delegate fee and proximity to Cambridge I had the chance to experience this year’s three-day London-based event. ‘Big Ben’, the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey were in close view from the conference centre as keynote speakers and chaired sessions explored the following themes: ‘Collections for the future’, ‘Valuing Learning’, ‘Cultural Tourism’, and ‘World cities, world cultures’. With at least four sessions running concurrently at any one time, choosing the most relevant topic to BMM, Bermuda, and my research was no easy task. Practically all of the session abstracts appeared locally applicable, reminding that Bermuda is not alone in our museum challenges and heritage-related debates.

Catch phrases like ‘Museums not Mausoleums!’ and ‘Use it or lose it!’ emphasised the increasing demands upon museums to go beyond the traditional role of steward, where the core mandate has been to preserve collections. Delegates were challenged by Bristol Museum Director Kate Brindley to become ‘collection activists’, to partner with one another to actively share our holdings with today’s generations, versus acquisition and storage for future research and community needs.

Besides making better use of existing collections for and by living communities, radical questions were raised about museums’ focus on ‘saving’ and the sustainability of collecting a surplus of historic material. This chiefly surrounded the care of archaeological specimens, amounts of which are unpredictable and treated equally by archaeologists and curators in terms of potential research and other unknown future value. Heritage scholar Nick Merriman underlined a growing ‘curation crisis’ under the UK’s planning system, a system which requires archaeological assessment of all new development projects and has led in recent years to a rapid rise in excavations and stored collections. If sustainability is defined as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’, Merriman argues that UK museums are failing on both counts. Bermuda unfortunately lacks similar provisions for developer-funded archaeology under a ‘polluter-pays’ principle and thus sees fewer academic surveys and excavations. However, the general point still applies to our local institutions, that putting off difficult collections decisions builds unmanageable problems and may lead to situations where external professionals or agendas make these choices for us. If museum professionals are to take our awesome responsibility as custodians of cultural heritage sites and collections seriously, we must be courageous to review, prioritise and be strategic about our holdings today.

In contrast, National Museums of Scotland Curator Alan Saville defended museums’ focus on objects and argued for their availability in the future, versus short-term and misguided access, refusal, dispersal, or disposal collections initiatives. While contemporary visitor needs and public access are core museum values, such cultural entitlement agendas should not compromise future scholarship, display, and other use. In that sense, storing collections for times when we may have greater knowledge, ability, and resources can also be considered a type of use.

Alissandra Cummins, Barbados Museum Director and International Congress of Museums President, was among the conference’s distinguished keynote speakers. Her speech, entitled ‘Islands in the Sun’ spoke to the ‘complicated blend of oppositions’ and pluralised identities operating in colonial and post-colonial societies, with special focus on the Atlantic Diaspora. The multiple meanings created in such environments—like Bermuda—pose challenges for the ways museums communicate the past. Caution was issued against an over-reliance on objects to narrate stories, instead suggesting better use of the ‘complex blend of intangibles’ that survive from the past and fabricate today’s multilayered cultures. This inspired thoughts as to how we might expand on BMM’s more recent efforts to incorporate oral testimony and local ethnography into exhibition and other projects. Other speakers echoed this suggestion, arguing that ideas—rather than objects—ought to steer and be central to forms of museum communication. Well-interpreted artefacts were nevertheless acknowledged to be powerful portals for contemporary publics to imaginatively journey into the past.

Issues of interpretation were indeed debated throughout the conference, with partnership between communities and museums as a major theme. The UK Culture Minister, David Lammy MP, spoke of the critical role museums play in providing a civic space for ‘distinctive cultural communities’ to link the past and future. As ‘memory institutions’ museums can alternatively help to reconcile or reinforce conflicts or different perspectives on history. While on the one hand museums should aim to build understanding and tolerance, we should also resist the impulse to tell only pleasant, neatly packaged and easily digestable stories. As curators, we must facilitate expression of the complex, sometimes painful, and often-untidy nature of history.

Speakers acknowledged museum audiences as active participants in their museum experiences rather than a neutral and passive public. Highlighted projects left room for visitors’ points of view. Rather than over-interpreting and explaining for visitors, some successful exhibition examples avoided textual overload or a condescending and impersonal style. Winning interpretative methods provided for audience ‘construction’ of unexpected, personalised, and emotional journeys. Thoughtful design and layout of exhibitions and associated material was noted as having a major impact on overall interpretive achievement.

Giving visitors a look and even involving them ‘behind the scenes’ in the inner workings of the museum was also viewed as an important audience stimulus and institutional mandate. Audrey Brown’s moving reflections on her curation of the South African apartheid prison at Johannesburg’s Constitution Hill highlighted the importance of encouraging community groups to ‘vigorously’ tell their version of past events. Learning goes both ways when community volunteers and museums engage in ‘collective conversations’ and a personalised process of ‘excavating memory’, where publics curate their own meanings and thereby deconstruct stereotyped histories.

Local public engagement was discussed further in terms of being a key factor for ethical cultural tourism. Often, it is a museum’s relevance to cultural tourism—an increasingly large part of global tourism, the world’s biggest industry—that strongly shapes that institution’s objectives and character. This influence was scrutinised by several speakers and peaked my interest given Bermuda’s profoundly tourism-oriented gaze. A strongly encouraged alternative was a relationship between museums and cultural tourism that is guided by bottom-up initiatives. Speakers suggested that locally mindful approaches provide greater and more sustained mutual benefit for local and tourist constituencies alike, as well as museums themselves.

Carrying on concerns for diverse publics was a fierce and quite justified critique of the lack of workforce diversity in the museum sector. The benefits and costs of positive discrimination were debated, with little resolution as to whether opening often closed doors to new demographics makes progressive strides towards more diverse representation in museum staff makeup, or, ultimately serves to reinforce discrimination with a maintained focus on ‘difference’. As we see throughout Bermuda’s professional sectors, local capacity building—including transplantable skill development—is crucial to both our fiscal and social stability. We in the island’s heritage sector must further open our professional doors to those from different backgrounds, although the best way to go about this is not always clear.

With BMM’s new exhibition and strategic objectives in mind, I sought out guidance for effective project management, hoping for some simple step-by-step instructions from experienced professionals. In one particularly stimulating session, speakers from London’s Huntarian surgical museum, Liverpool’s World Museum, and Blaenafon’s Big Pit museum outlined recent exhibition development projects. Their refreshingly honest discussion underlined that there’s ‘no one size fits all’ solution to planning and implementing successful projects. Instead they demonstrated that the recipe depends upon the museum and audiences targeted, using a unique mix of ingredients such as clear vision, defined audiences, sufficient funding, disaster and contingency planning, and above all energetic staff and volunteers. Dr. Yasser Mansour’s impressive presentation of Cairo’s plans for the new Grand Museum of Egypt underlined the similar challenges that both small and large museum projects face. That said, the project’s estimated $550 million government-funded budget, 1,800 staff, and six football fields of display space left BMM’s grand plans looking relatively dwarfed and straightforward!

With over 1,000 other colleagues present and plenty of tea and coffee to go around, I did my best to make most of this rare networking opportunity. The crowd was predominantly UK-based, but with a fair number of international institutions also represented, including some Caribbean representatives. Unsurprisingly, a Bermuda connection came up in nearly every caffeine-laden encounter. The good number of those I met familiar with BMM indicated positively the extent to which our institutional efforts reach beyond Bermuda’s shores. The trade show that accompanied the conference provided introduction to an array of professional products and services. Catching glimpse of my Bermuda Maritime Museum delegate badge, sales representatives did not hesitate to offer me on site consultation for their various collections storage units, display cases, cataloguing software, interactive visitor guides, and so on!

The Museums Association 2005 conference gave me a sense of belonging to an international sector and reservoir of expertise. It provided much food for about museology in general as well as specific issues pertaining to BMM and Bermuda. I came away feeling that forums like this stimulate our critical thinking and help us grow as museum professionals.