Museums change their story | 博物馆改变了叙事方式

文摘   文化   2024-12-02 20:13   法国  


有人说,历史是胜利者书写的。位于纽约市的美国自然历史博物馆和世界各地其他博物馆力图改变这种状况。博物馆意识到自己的藏品往往反映出昔日殖民主义的姿态,于是开始反思自身角色和做法。


雷切尔·费尔德(Rachel Felder)
美国纽约文化记者兼作家



位于纽约市的美国自然历史博物馆自19世纪晚期开放以来,一直是深受当地人和游客喜爱的热门景点。如今的参观体验与150年前大不一样了,这倒不仅仅是因为参观者的口袋里装着手机和蓝牙耳机盒。

今年1月,博物馆关闭了涉及美洲原住民的两个大型展厅。七个展示柜里原本陈列着与原住民社区有关的种类繁多的物品,其中还有两件夏威夷岛民的物件,而现在这些展示柜都被遮盖起来,游客和工作人员再也无法窥见其中的展品。博物馆一层醒目的位置设有一个展区,讲述了原住民首领与殖民领袖的交往互动的情况。就在几年前,博物馆给这处展览添加了新的标牌,上面有大号印刷体说明——“请重新审视这一幕”。并配上了醒目的印刷体说明。

文化转向

近年来发生这些变化,部分原因是由于《美国原住民墓藏保护与归还法案》(NAGPRA)修正了法案内容。该法案于1990年生效,要求美国机构将原本属于原住民和原住民社区的物品(例如,各历史博物馆中常见的收藏品)物归原主。除了这种政府法令,世界各地的博物馆其实一直在努力转变观点,采用非殖民化视角,这番调整可以帮助博物馆摆脱早已过时的民族观念和当初藉由殖民统治获得的大量收藏品。

世界各地的博物馆其实一直在努力转变观点,采用非殖民化视角


© 泰瑞·格里夫斯(Teri Greeves) / 照片:丹·巴索蒂(Dan Barsotti) 来自美国俄克拉荷马州基奥瓦部落的艺术家泰瑞·格 里 夫 斯(Teri Greeves)的作品《NDN艺术》(NDN Art)使用了传统的基奥瓦串珠工艺。


美国自然历史博物馆馆长肖恩·迪凯特(Sean Decatur)表示:“我们认识到,部分藏品当初收入博物馆时依据的道德准则,按照今天的标准来看是不可接受的。我们不仅需要遵守法律规定,对于不在《美国原住民墓藏保护与归还法案》保护范围内的其他藏品,也应承认这些藏品的来源,纠正以往在道德上的失误。”

博物馆未来中心隶属于行业组织美国博物馆联盟,它的创始董事、战略前瞻部副主管伊丽莎白·梅里特(Elizabeth Merritt)指出:“博物馆终于意识到,不仅要对周边社区负责,更要对全球社会负责。”


梅里特说:“这是大范围的文化转向的一部分,旨在摆脱占主流的殖民叙事,这种叙事在过去几百年里一直从根本上影响着收藏行业。”


博物馆终于意识到,不仅要对周边社区负责,更要对全球社会负责


各种类型的博物馆,无论其主要侧重美术、设计、历史、科学,还是流行文化,都可以采取不同形式的纠正措施。多家博物馆在展览安排上采用了包容性做法,展出了曾受殖民统治的社区的相关内容。例如,加拿大国家美术馆(安大略省渥太华)今年夏天的展览就包括莫霍克族艺术家雪莱·尼罗(Shelley Niro)作品回顾展和加拿大原住民艺术家珠饰作品专题展。

2019 年,美国明尼阿波利斯美术馆举办了一场名为“民族之心:女性原住民艺术家”的群展。位于纽约的美国自然历史博物馆将在今年秋季举办“不断变化的博物馆”展览,回顾这家博物馆以往的收藏工作,研究多年来的变化轨迹和未来的发展方向。

新叙事

有时,一家博物馆的名称直接昭示出对于非殖民化的义无反顾。位于加州的圣地亚哥人类博物馆就建在库梅亚伊部族世代相传的土地上,2020年,这家博物馆更名为“我们的博物馆”。博物馆的宣传材料是这样解释的:“‘我们的博物馆’讲述着塑造人类本性的丰富多彩的故事,尤其是长期以来遭到主流文化叙事忽视或压制的故事。”

“我们必须审视历史,认识到必须改变我们以往看待历史、暴力、压迫、控制等问题的方式。”加拿大国家美术馆原住民事务和非殖民化部副主管史蒂文·洛夫特(Steven Loft)如是说道。“所有博物馆都在努力接受这一概念,这是一个漫长的过程,我们要做的就是彻底改变这些叙事的呈现方式。在文化领域,我们必须从根本上改变所有这些现行做法。”

洛夫特先生担任的这种职务越来越常见了。在苏格兰的格拉斯哥,桑德拉·耶曼(Zandra Yeaman)是亨特博物馆的一位“痛苦策展人”。按照计划,其工作是让博物馆冲破传统而且往往早已过时的疆界。通过开展“帝国、奴隶制和苏格兰博物馆”项目,苏格兰积极投身非殖民化工作。该项目得到政府资助,目的是协助本国文化机构修正视角和内容。

持久的改变

随着时间的推移,众多博物馆专家都乐观地认为,非殖民化运动会持续开展下去。为博物馆及其工作人员提供咨询的行业机构英国博物馆协会主席莎朗·希尔(Sharon Heal)表示:“我希望看到非殖民化运动进一步融入博物馆的日常工作,推动博物馆主动思考何为勇气,如何对社区负责,并深入研究,揭露不为人知的往事和被隐瞒的历史,能够承认博物馆犯下了哪些错误,或是坦承以往采用剥削和压榨的方式收藏文物。”


联合国教科文组织推出全球首个被盗文物虚拟博物馆


盗窃、掠夺和非法贩运文化财产属于犯罪行为。它们剥夺了人们的历史和文化,破坏了长期的社会凝聚力,助长有组织犯罪和资助恐怖主义。为了加大对其打击力度,总干事奥德蕾·阿祖莱(Audrey Azoulay)在联合国教科文组织2022年世界文化政策与可持续发展会议(MONDIACULT 2022)上宣布,将创建一个被盗文物虚拟博物馆。她在谈到该项目时表示:“我们的目标是让这些作品重新成为人们关注的焦点,并恢复社会对其遗产的观赏、体验并从中认识自己的权利。”

几十年来,文化遗产遭受袭击的现象愈发严重,这给许多国家造成了不可挽回的损失。非法贩运的不断增加也令人担忧。国际刑警组织(INTERPOL)开展国际合作的年度数据无可争议:2023年逮捕了60人,追回11049件物品。鉴于文物作为遗产的重要性和经济价值,它们很可能会引起盗贼和有组织犯罪的注意。

保护文化遗产就是保护我们共同的历史,只有共同行动才能阻止被盗文物的非法贸易;因此,打击非法贩运是每个人的责任。为了提高公众,尤其是年轻人对非法贩运问题的认识,并促进世界各地被盗和失踪文物的追回,联合国教科文组织将与其成员国、技术合作伙伴以及当地社区合作,实施这一沉浸式的创新项目。

承担该平台设计工作的是布基纳法索建筑师、2022年普利兹克建筑奖获得者弗朗西斯·凯雷(Francis Kéré),其设计灵感来自猴面包树,它是“坚韧不拔的象征,是许多非洲社区生活的核心”。这个数字博物馆的初版草图和创建计划于2023年10月3日在联合国教科文组织总部公布。

联合国教科文组织解释说,参观者探索虚拟空间时将如同在现实中的博物馆一样,可以观赏到文物的3D模型和有教育意义的数字内容,以及因文化财产消失而受到影响的社区的故事和证言。

该博物馆的首个版本将于2025年推出,展出约600件被盗和失踪文物。联合国教科文组织成员国受邀挑选那些因失踪和被盗而使其国家文化遗产严重受损的文物。

相关链接:
国际刑警组织开展国际合作的年度数据
https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2023/International-art-trafficking-operation-leads-to-60-arrests-and-over-11-000-objects-recovered




Museums change their story


It’s been said that history is written by the victors. The American Museum of Natural History in New York City and other museums around the world are working to change that. Aware that their collections often reflect bygone attitudes of colonialism, they are rethinking their role and approach.


Rachel Felder

Cultural journalist and author in New York, USA


Since it first opened in the late 1800s, New York City’s American Museum of Natural History has been a popular destination for locals and tourists. These days, the experience is very different than it was for visitors 150 years ago, and not just because they walk in with mobile phones and bluetooth earbud cases in their pockets.


In January, the museum closed two large exhibition spaces dedicated to Indigenous peoples; seven display cases that included a variety of items related to Indigenous communities, including two with Hawaiian-American items, were covered so as to no longer be seen by visitors or staff. And a few years ago, large printed explanations were added to a prominent ground floor display of an interaction between Indigenous and colonial leaders, under a new label, in large letters, that reads “Reconsidering this scene”.

A cultural shift

In part, the recent changes were due to regulation updates of NAGPRA – the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which, since 1990, has required American institutions to return belongings, like the type of items that are often in history museums, to the Indigenous peoples and communities they were once a part of. Beyond this type of governmental mandate, museums worldwide have been shifting their perspective towards decolonization, a recalibration that moves institutional content away from antiquated ethnic viewpoints and collections fueled by colonial rule.

Museums worldwide have been shifting their perspective towards decolonization”

“We recognize that there are items in our collection that have been brought to the museum in the past under ethical standards that we would not see as acceptable today,” says Sean Decatur, the American Museum of Natural History’s president, “and that there is a need, not just in the places where the law directs us, but in other parts of our collection as well that don’t fall under the umbrella of NAGPRA, to recognize them, and to correct for those ethical lapses of the past.”

“Museums have come to realize that they’re accountable not just to their immediate community but to the global community,” says Elizabeth Merritt, vice president of Strategic Foresight and founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums, part of the American Alliance of Museums, a trade organization.

“This is part of a larger cultural shift away from a dominant colonial narrative, and that colonial narrative shaped collecting practices for the past centuries,” she adds.

Museums have come to realize that they’re accountable not just to their immediate community but to the global community

For museums of all types – whether their main focus is fine art, design, history, science, or pop culture – those corrections can take different forms. Many are taking an inclusive approach to programming, with content linked to communities that were once under colonial control. This past summer’s programming at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, for example, included a retrospective of the work of Shelley Niro, a Mohawk artist, and a show spotlighting the beadwork of indigenous Canadian artists.

In 2019, the lineup of the Minneapolis Institute of Art in the United States included a group show called “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists”. This fall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, “The Changing Museum” looks at that institution’s history of collection practices, how those have changed, and in what ways they continue to evolve.

New narratives

Sometimes a commitment towards decolonization can be as straightforward as an institution’s name. In California, the San Diego Museum of Man, which sits on the ancestral land of the Indigenous Kumeyaay peoples, was renamed The Museum of Us in 2020. As it explains in its promotional materials, “The Museum of Us is a place for the diverse stories that define us – especially those that have long been overlooked or silenced by dominant cultural narratives.”

“We’ve had to look at history, understanding that we have to shift the way we think about histories, violence, oppression, control,” says Steven Loft, the vice president of the National Gallery of Canada’s Department of Indigenous Ways and Decolonization. “As all institutions grapple with the notion – it’s been a long process for a long time – we have to take the position that we must fundamentally change and shift how we present those narratives. In the cultural sector we have to change all of those things on the foundational level.”

Positions like Mr. Loft’s are becoming more common. In Glasgow, Scotland, The Hunterian Museum has a curator of discomfort, Zandra Yeaman, who works as part of a program to take the museum out of its traditional – and frequently antiquated – boundaries. Scotland has been particularly active in its decolonization efforts through the Empire, Slavery & Scotland’s Museums project, a government-funded initiative to help reshape the perspective and content of the country’s cultural institutions.

Enduring change

As time goes on, many museum experts are optimistic that the move toward decolonization is here to stay. “I would hope to see it become much more embedded in everyday practice for institutions, for them to think proactively about being brave, being accountable to communities, and to doing deep research to uncover some of these untold stories and hidden histories, and being able to acknowledge where institutions have got it wrong or have collected in an exploitative way and an extracted way in the past,” says Sharon Heal, director of the Museums Association, a British trade group which advises museums and their staffs.


UNESCO launches the first Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects


The theft, looting and illicit trafficking of cultural property are crimes. They deprive people of their history and culture, undermine long-term social cohesion, fuel organized crime and help finance terrorism. To step up the fight against this scourge, Director-General Audrey Azoulay announced the creation of a virtual museum of stolen cultural objects at UNESCO's Mondiacult world conference in 2022: “Our objective is to place these works back in the spotlight, and to restore the right of societies to access their heritage, experience it, and recognize themselves in it,” she said about the project.


For decades, we have been witnessing an acceleration in attacks on heritage, causing irreparable damage in numerous countries. The increase in illicit trafficking is alarming. The annual figures regarding international cooperation conducted by INTERPOL are indisputable: 60 arrests and 11,049 objects recovered in 2023. Given their significance as heritage and their financial value, cultural objects are likely to attract the attention of both petty thieves and organized crime.


Protecting cultural heritage preserves our shared history, and only collective action can stem the illegal trade in stolen cultural objects; the fight against illicit trafficking is therefore everyone's responsibility. To raise awareness among the general public, particularly young people, of the issues surrounding illicit trafficking and to facilitate the recovery of stolen and missing cultural objects around the world, this innovative and immersive project will be run by UNESCO, in collaboration with its Member States, technical partners and local communities.


The design of the platform has been entrusted to Francis Kéré, an architect from Burkina Faso and winner of the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize, who was inspired by the shape of a baobab tree, “symbol of resilience and central to the lives of many African communities”. The first sketches and plans for this digital museum were presented on 3 October 2023 at UNESCO Headquarters.


UNESCO explains that visitors will explore the virtual spaces as they would in a real museum, with access to 3D modelling of objects and educational digital content, as well as stories and testimonies from communities affected by the disappearance of cultural property.


A first version of the museum, featuring some 600 stolen and missing cultural objects, will be launched in 2025. UNESCO Member States have been invited to select objects whose disappearance and theft have significantly impoverished their national cultural heritage.


Links:

INTERPOL’s annual figures regarding international cooperation

https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2023/International-art-trafficking-operation-leads-to-60-arrests-and-over-11-000-objects-recovered





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