Museums between National and European Identities

By Bodil Axelsson

This post reports from the panels on Eunamus research and the creation of new history museums held at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, the Cinquantenaire Museum, the 25^th of January. The panels were co-organised by Eunamus and the House of European History.

Museums have a role to play in the European unification. That was the message from Professor Chrysoula Paliadeli who in her role as a member of the European Parliament was invited to comment on the policy relevance of Eunamus research.

Martin Schaerer, Chrysoula Paliadeli, Gabriella Elgenius,

Dominique Poulot and Peter Aronsson

In his presentation, project coordinator Peter Aronsson pointed to the ways in which museums form a necessary part of a ‘cultural constitution’ supporting both a connective tissue of culture and underpinning the communicative spaces that are so crucial for democracy. Dominique Poulot emphasized how many national museums today strive to go beyond the national, to become agents of cultural diplomacy or to produce new representations of Europe in temporary exhibitions.

Picking up threads from both presentations, Chrysoula Paliadeli, stressed the importance of culture in times of economic crisis. She also raised concerns about national separatism and suggested that museums may support the European idea by collaborations, loans and exchanges. In his talk, Martin Schaerer from ICOM provided a bridge to the second panel: Entering the mine-fields – the creation of new history museums in Europe.

New history museums are on the top of the museum policy agenda in many countries in contemporary Europe. They are created by politicians, implemented by academics and made for the public. It seems to be a need for the reconstruction of identities that sparks these initiatives. It is not only conservative, or right wing, politicians who support them, rather opponents and proponents are found in several political camps, from left to right, and among both liberals and republicans.

How do then academics respond to the roles and tasks given them? The panellists seemed to agree upon the necessity of destabilizing simple and one-dimensional national identities by creating exhibitions that displays the ways in which national and European histories are constructed rather than given. The German case has proven successful, but time will tell how audiences will react to the other initiatives.

Deutsches Historisches Museum

Rosmarie Beier-de Haan from the Deutsches Historisches Museum opened the discussions by highlighting how she and her colleagues had started with the question: who are the Germans today? Robert Kostro, from the National Museum for Polish History talked about how they are moulding a new narrative of freedom and democracy to support Polish identity. He also underlined that when handing over the task of creating a new museum to academics, politicians do not always get want they want.

Similarly, Charles Personnaz from The Maison de l’Histoire de France advocated the freedom of historians. This French initiative has sparked a sometimes fierce public debate on the possibility of producing a national history. What about the regions and the diversity of cultures within the contemporary state? Who are the French citizens and what is the role of history in the construction of a shared space for citizenry? In this situation, politicians may propose a museum, but they cannot dictate historical narratives.

The future House of European History

The task given to Taja Vovk-van Gaal at the House of the European History, initiated by the European Parliament, is different. She coordinates academics from 18 countries and this museum is created in interactions between the staff. It is not about exhibiting a European mosaic of countries, but about displaying a reflexive European history, also including dark chapters such as colonialism and armed conflicts.

The public debates surrounding the House of European History concern the economic legitimacy of the initiative, rather than the content. This bias may be interpreted as a consequence of the current economic crisis, but it may also be interpreted as a lack of public interest in a common European history, perhaps also reflecting the need for a shared space to discuss cultural issues, and to enhance legitimacy for the European project.

The panels were moderated by Gabriella Elgenius, University of Oxford and Chantal Kesteloot, Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society, Brussels.

There are plans to publish the talks later this year.

Programme

Read more on the event on the blog Une mine d’histoires / histoire de mines or in Swedish on the Museum nu blog

Eric Grubel delivered the speech prepared by Professor Michel Draguet, General Director a.i. of the Royal Museums of Art and History.

Alexandra Kalogirou replaced Xavier Troussard to represent the European Commission’s Directorate General Education and Culture.

Octavio Quintana Trias represented the European Commission’s   Directorate General Research and Innovation.

Picture of the panelists: Andrew Sawyer, the Deutsches Historisches Museum: Peter Aronsson, and the future House of European History, Bodil Axelsson. Pictures below: Andrew Sawyer.

Peter Aronsson introduces Eunamus.

Felicity Bodenstein launches Eunamus wiki on heritage conflicts.

Are national museums prepared for Creative Europe?

Creativity and diversity, these two buzzwords are at the heart of the new EU programme dedicated to the cultural and creative sectors,  and proposed by the European Commission on 23 November 2011. During the next year the proposal Creative Europe, will be discussed among the Council of EU Ministers and the European Parliament before its possible realisation. It is an important programme as it is connected to the Multiannual Financial Framework for 2014-2020, and thus decides the roles for culture for a considerable time frame. The new programme differs from its forerunners due to the fact that it joins the previously separated areas media and culture. Digitalisation and the increased role of the cultural and creative sectors of the European economy are bringing the two areas together.

When Vladimír Šucha introduced the programme to the cultural sector in Sweden the message was that the economy alone cannot bring together the European member states. Culture was introduced as the way forward out of the monetary crisis at an event significantly coloured by the fact that in Brussels the leaders of the European member states discussed how to solve the crises for the single currency and how to keep trust among the member states. Šucha, who is the Director for Culture, Multilingualism and Communication, at the Directorate General for Education and Culture of the European Commission, stressed that culture cannot be a mere decoration. Rather, the sector is an economic asset to be used in education as well as in social and industrial innovation.

View photostream from the event Europaprojektets framtid organised by Intercult et al.

A European take on Cosmopolitanism                                                                         With its focus on developing capacities among artists and cultural professionals to work across borders and financial instruments to support transnational cultural activities of small companies within and outside of the EU, the programme could be seen as expression of a European take on Cosmopolitanism. Šucha himself warned for locking culture in regional and national boxes. His arguments on extended transnational collaboration were further radicalized by Chris Torch, one of the moderators at the event and in the context of European cultural policy a well-known proponent of cultural diversity and multicultural mélange also within nations.

National Museum initiatives                                                                                                                                                  But where does this suggested step towards increased economically based cosmopolitanism, which is now complementing EU:s motto “united in difference”, leave national museums, established markers of national identities? As a matter of fact, museums are already building capacities for creativity, innovation and transnational collaboration. NEMO, the Network of European Museum Organisations, provides a database with links to projects on Innovation and Creativity in Museums, Intercultural Dialogue and lifelong learning in museums, and Digitisation in European Museums. Transnational collaboration is also built into the topic of collection mobility, which has been on the agenda for about ten years now. This topic has generated working groups, guidelines and an impressive volume with editors from several European museums. Another forward-looking project is LEM, the learning museums network project. The LEM project has 23 partners from 17 European countries and the US. It is funded under the EU Lifelong Learning Programme Grundtvig. The Mobility Scheme is one of many activities this network coordinates. Five of the LEM partners have agreed to host colleagues for job-shadowing or study visits.

It is clear that museum networks as well as the European Union already have acted in the directions proposed in the new Creative Europe Programme. The question is though if the new programme relates to museums at all with its emphasis on access to finance for small under-capitalised enterprises. EuNaMus will closely follow the discussions on the reception of the Creative Europe Programme and return to the subject in 2012.

More on great historical narratives in Europe’s national museums

José María Lanzarote Guiral reports from the second international conference on “Great historical narratives in Europe’s national museums”, held in the Louvre and Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris from the 25^th to the 26 of November.

As at the previous conference in June , a selection of speakers coming from all over Europe and beyond gathered in Paris to debate on key issues for the development of Eunamus research strand “Uses of the Past, narrating the nation and negotiating conflict”.

One major question, “To what extent can national museums be considered as authors of great historical narratives?” had enticed more than 25 researchers and museum professionals to respond the call.  Papers in both English and French spanned from the Prado to the British Museum and from the Sami National Museum in Norway to the new Acropolis Museum in Greece.  Some of the most relevant European museums were analysed from different perspectives; several papers discussed the ways in which museums  historically have formed collections or reinterpreted existing ones in order to construct national master narratives. Other papers highlighted how museums strive to respond to the questions posed by increasingly transnational European societies.

The discussions were started by presentations given by keynote speakers. María Bolaños opened the first session with an overview of the creation of national museums in Spain. A long-term historical perspective was also chosen by Ellinoor Bergvelt to analyse the history of Dutch national museums. Finally, the extra-European dimension was considered in the opening of the third session by Alexandra Loumpet-Galitzine, who discussed the creation of national museums in several French-speaking African countries.

Narratives supporting the 19^th century nationmaking                                                                                                                                         The visualisation of the national narrative in museums promoted by the 19^th century nation-state in formation was analysed by Eugenia Afinoguenova on the Prado Museum, Miklós Székely on the Hungarian National Museum, and Aleksandar Ignatović on the National Museum of Belgrade in this case in the Interwar Period.

Diachronic studies of museums                                                                                                 Diachronic studies were provided by Frank Matthias Kammel on the evolution of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, Amy Clarke on the transformation of the Royal Museum of Scotland to National Museum, or by Gabor Ébli, who analysed, from a comparative perspective, the making of national galleries in Central and Eastern Europe. Adding new elements to the debate, Costanze Breuer reflected on the intersecting of the national and the great men narrative while considering Goethe’s House in Weimar.

Controlled museum spaces                                                                                                        Some other presentations discussed the relationship between museum creation and display in regimes marked by strong ideological control, such as Melania Savino on the archaeological Museums in the Turkish Republic or Gabriella Petkova-Campbell on the impact of communism in Bulgarian national museums.

The nation’s accomplishments                                                                                                 The role of the museum in visualising the accomplishments of the nation was the topic of Annie Malama, on the Greek Museum of Modern art, or Cristina Ntaflou’s on the newly opened Museum of the Acropolis.

Challenges of postmodernity and contested authority                                             How museums deal with the challenges of the postmodernity was the subject of the presentations by Tiffany Jenkins on “inverting the nation” at the British museum, Martin Sundberg on Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and Pascale Meyer on the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. Contested authority related to anthropological artefacts was a key issue in several presentations, such as the one by Hilde Nielssen and Sigrid Lien on the Sami National Museum in Norway or the one by Leila Koivunen on the National Museum of Finland. In a different key, Maria Anna Bertolino considered local museums of ethnography in Northern Italy.

Considering also temporary exhibitions                                                                            Not only national museums but also the visualisation of master narratives in national and international exhibitions were discussed by some speakers, such as for instance Giovanni Arena, who reflected on the 1941 colonial exhibition organised by the Fascist regime in Naples, and Michela Passini’s on the Jeu de Paume exhibitions in Paris during the Interwar Period. In turn, Nathalie Cerezales reflected on the subtle interplay of the religious and the aesthetic message in the exhibitions of sacred art in the 1990s in Spain.

Finally, some other topics related to the means of displaying and protecting collections in the national museums were considered, for instance, by Sylvain Cordier, who spoke on the role of furniture in the Museum of French History created by King Louis Phillipe in Versailles, or Arnaud Bertinet on the safekeeping of French works of art during French-Prussian War in 1873. In the last presentation, Caroline Caillet dealt with the negotiations for restitution of artworks between Alger and France after the decolonisation, opening the debate on heritage restitution that will be pursued further in the next conference, in Brussels in January 26-27^th.

Eunamus’ partner University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, led by Prof. Dominique Poulot, organised the conference.

Great historical narratives in Europe’s national museums II

This conference expands the knowledge on the ways in which museums adapt their explicit narratives to changing social and political situations. It is organised by Dominique Poulot and Felicity Bodenstein and takes place in Paris 25-26 November, as this post is published. On the conference, a row of papers explore the ways in which narratives in national museums link to ruling monarchs, state ideologies, or (post)colonial relations. Several papers highlight the ways in which museums alter collections, or reinterpret existing collections, to modify their messages, when political regimes changes. Other papers highlight how museums adjust to more subtle changes in public opinions, in ways of for example handling imperial pasts.

Read all the abstracts here and the full programme here.

National museums of Australia

Peter Aronsson

Where is it? Laurajane Smith and Kylie Message, Australia National University, are the best guides you could imagine for an understanding of the dynamics of the Australian National Museum since it opened in 2001. They make me understand how central and adjustable the exhibitions are to changes in contemporary politics. The short history of the museum shows shadows of the History Wars of Australia. Exhibitions moves from focusing people and stories to objects, territory and chronology. Colonialism becomes hidden in general migration.
It is Remembrance Day 11 November, and at 11 trumpets sounds and a silent minute is held for the sacrifice of war. The war memorial placed in line with both the old and the new parliament create an axis of memory and politics like the Mall in Washington, flanked by National Gallery, National Library, the High Court. At the War memorial the names of the fallen soldiers are honored and the statement that Australia was borne on the shores of Gallipoli is transferred to new generations. A new heritage is constituted by the Old parliament that turned into a museum of democracy and the site of the Aboriginal protest tent camp from the 1970′s that now is protected as a heritage site. Altogether this forms a functional national museum that goes beyond the ANM, contextualize it, and highlights its political location.
However you need a car to experience this in its totality, and perhaps a few more hours than I had to fully appreciate its complexity. It is a heritage alive – and today Barack Obama will pay his respect at the War Memorial and make his contribution to the history wars where pride over white achievements balance with regrets for atrocities against the Aboriginal inhabitants of the continent.

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Balkan history – facilitating dialogues on conflicting pasts – blogpost by Peter Aronsson

Anthony Krause at the UNESCO office of Venice has called on national history museums in South East Europe to work together on a traveling exhibition. Museum leaders from 12 countries met for the third time in Torino 5-6 October for the workshop History, memory and dialogue in South-East Europe: Exploring the Identity of Nations.

Four independent experts was called to comment on a proposal for the exhibition and give advice from various perspectives. Experienced leader from Deutsches Historisches Museum gave advice on how to negotiate collaboration, ICOM executives provided important input on the various steps and sequence best suited to process the proposal, the leader of history educations in Council of Europe gave input on how to frame the uses of history to comply with contemporary international standards.  I was invited as the coordinator of Eunamus and I used the project’s comparative perspectives to give models for how different conflicts have been treated by national museums in the World, what tools are accessible, and what can be learned by these earlier experiences.

The choice of the group is not to deal directly with the recent past but to find a common ground in the Ottoman past of the long nineteenth century. This was at the same time birthplace of modernity and national movements that frame later generations struggle to organize their life and society. Goals, target groups, themes to work with was discussed, and a first venue was set for Slovenia, where the next working meeting will take place in Ljubljana.

The undertaking is very important as one part of building a new future through dealing with the past on the Balkan. There are several initiatives already at play on the Balkans, but non that involves so many central museum partners with concrete collaboration. The possibility for Eunamus to feed into this contemporary practice and use the knowledge from the project to be part of producing quality in a traveling exhibition is an exciting invitation and experience with potential importance to make a difference for future progressive interaction of museums in the making of nations and states in the area.

The meeting took place in Torino to get inspiration of the Italian commemoration of its existence as a state in 150 years. The celebrations are of course framed by exhibitions. The new opening of the Risorgimento museum of the first capital in Italy (1861-1865), a very popular national temporary exhibition, The Making of Italians, show different modes of museography.

Museum beyond the nation – report from a conference session

The last two years archaeologist Johan Hegardt has been working on a project on the history of the Swedish National Historical Museum with Patrik Nordström, Fredrik Svanberg and Malin Grundberg.

In this blog he reports from the session, “Museum beyond the nation”,  he and his colleagues organised at Places, people, stories an interdisciplinary & international conference. Linnaeus University, Kalmar 28-30 September 2011.

By Johan Hegardt

A museum is a place where stories and people meet. A museum is also very much an interdisciplinary and international spot, even though, according to my view, many national museums have problems accepting this. The idea of this session was to discuss museums in a setting beyond the nation or the national, or looking into museums that have found themselves locked inside the nation. To broaden the Swedish perspective, Dr Kylie Message from The Australian National University in Canberra, Professor Dan Karlholm from Södertörn University in Stockholm and Sir David Wilson from the UK were invited to join researchers from the National Historical Museum.

The first three papers discussed the politics of museum spaces. The first speaker was Fredrik Svanberg with the paper ”From Collecting the Nation to Collecting the Cosmopolitan”, in which he discussed the ways in which the National Historical Museum’s structures of collecting nationalises objects found in Swedish soil, but once made somewhere else.

Kylie Message’s paper ”Museums, Topicality, and Collecting Today ‘For Tomorrow’” focused ”on the controversies that arose in the 1960s from the attempts of curators at the National Museum of American History to collect controversial contemporary materials that reflected current-day socio-political change and debate”.

In her paper ”The National Historical Museum in Stockholm from a gender perspective”, Malin Grundberg investigated how many of the museum’s temporary exhibitions had women or femininity as explicit themes. Only 4% of the 300 temporary exhibitions have been on women. Thus, at the National Historical Museum, “the history of Sweden has been the history of men”.

Two papers addressed museum architecture. Mattias Ekman’s paper ”An Edifice of Stories. Personal, Professional, and National Remembering in the National Gallery, Oslo” addressed ”the current use of the building as a spatial framework for the organising, retrieving and disseminating of memory”. An interview with author Gerd Brantenberg, whose relation to the gallery is marked by a significant childhood experience, and one with a senior curator at the gallery, Nils Messel, who structures knowledge of the institution with the help of the building, enables a distinction between personal and professional use of “the museum as a mnemonic instrument”.

In his paper ”The New Neues Museum in Berlin: Accumulating Concepts of History”,
Dan Karlholm situated ”the recently renovated and reconstructed Neues Museum within its unique place as one of five museums of art on the so-called Museumsinsel in Berlin. The whole ‘island’ was granted World Heritage status in 1999, but the Neues Museum was only re-inaugurated in 2009. Neues Museum has transformed into a layered artefact itself, with traces of several historical periods, each carefully preserved in accordance with the Venice Charter.” Karlholm discussed ”whether this museum represents a new type, premised on a new concept of history, compared to traditional, national, historicist as well as modernist or even postmodernist museums”.

Two papers considered the concept of national museums in territorial scales other than the nation. Zeljka Miklosevic explored in her paper ”From National to Regional Narratives” the concept of ecomuseums and its relationship to national museums stressing that ”such a development projected in the future might lead to the formation
throughout Europe of numerous museums of regions which could more genuinely create a sense of place through regional narratives, and thereby replace the domination the national museums have had for such a long time”.

In the last paper, ”The British Museum. Purpose and Politics, Past and Present”, former
head of The British Museum Sir David Wilson underlined that ”nobody knows where the name ‘British Museum’ came from. It emerged in 1753 as the name of an Act of Parliament. As a product of the Enlightenment, however, there was no attempt to identify it with the nation, rather it was seen in a universal context at a time when there was a firm belief in intellectual minds that the whole sum of human knowledge could be retrieved and presented in a systematic fashion to the thinking public. The museum embraced all human knowledge in this spirit.” From my point of view, it is interesting that ”this was to narrow ‘national’ museum is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that there was no British Gallery in the Museum until the middle of the nineteenth century, when throughout Europe such museums were springing to life with growing nationalism”.

The different papers provoked many questions and it was difficult, I admit, to stop the discussions even though time was running out. The seven papers will be published
early in 2012.

The project A historical museum and how it shaped Sweden is hosted by the National Historical Museum, Stockholm, and is financed by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and the Swedish Arts council. A generous grant from the Academy enabled all participants to travel to Kalmar. The project is interlinked with the EUNAMUS project, which is beneficial for our little group of researchers.