Curating the Future

Museums, Communities and Climate Change

Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin, Kirsten Wehner, Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin, Kirsten Wehner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317217954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Studi museali

Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change explores the way museums tackle the broad global issue of climate change. It explores the power of real objects and collections to stir hearts and minds, to engage communities affected by change.

Museums work through exhibitions, events, and specific collection projects to reach different communities in different ways. The book emphasises the moral responsibilities of museums to address climate change, not just by communicating science but also by enabling people already affected by changes to find their own ways of living with global warming.

There are museums of natural history, of art and of social history. The focus of this book is the museum communities, like those in the Pacific, who have to find new ways to express their culture in a new place. The book considers how collections in museums might help future generations stay in touch with their culture, even where they have left their place. It asks what should the people of the present be collecting for museums in a climate-changed future? The book is rich with practical museum experience and detailed projects, as well as critical and philosophical analyses about where a museum can intervene to speak to this great conundrum of our times. Curating the Future is essential reading for all those working in museums and grappling with how to talk about climate change. It also has academic applications in courses of museology and museum studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, digital humanities, design, anthropology, and environmental humanities.

1
Introduction

Curating connections in a climate-changed world

Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin and Kirsten Wehner*

This book springs from the convictions that climate change demands urgent transformations in the ways we think about ourselves and our world, and that museums are effective places for supporting conversation about and action on this issue. This book also responds to the perception that museums need to develop new modes of thinking and practice in order to fully embrace this role. Curating the Future considers how contemporary museums are reshaping some of the conceptual, material and organizational structures that have historically underpinned their own institutions and, more broadly, modes of living in the world that have produced climate change. It explores how diverse museums are engaging with attitudes and practices of ‘relationality’, tracing how these institutions are, along four key trajectories, building bridges across deep-seated separations between colonized and colonizer, Nature and Culture, local and global, authority and uncertainty.

Curating the Future brings together perspectives from many parts of the world, celebrating how museums can function as spaces that enable the ‘coming together’ across time and geography of peoples, ideas and stories. The book explores museums as places that foster learning of many different kinds, including through congregation and sharing and in emotional and embodied, as well as analytical, modes. Moreover, it gains impetus from the ways in which museums, despite decades of critical re-evaluation, remain for many of their publics trusted sources of information.¹ These traditions suggest that museums are well placed to enable new forms of collaboration and community through which innovative responses to the frequently highly politicized issue of climate change might be nurtured. The chapters that follow discuss a variety of initiatives in this vein, reflecting on interpreting collections in collaboration with communities, engaging diverse visitors with climate-change science, and experimenting with exhibitions and performances that excite people’s hearts, as well as minds.

Reflecting their centrality to museums, Curating the Future focuses strongly on objects and collections. Many of this book’s chapters investigate how collections of diverse types, media and locations, including those held outside museums proper, can be understood as materializing processes of climate change. Short “Object in View” studies sketch out how individual objects can prompt imaginative engagements with this issue. In a sense, this book presents an assemblage of texts through which collections emerge as inter-generational carriers of stories – things that dramatize experiences of cultural-ecological crises and have the capacity to foster cohesion and resilience in the face of them. We hope that it will stimulate museums to consider more fully how they might build new collections, interpretations and collaborations that engage communities and develop their capacities to respond to climate change.

The relational museum

The relational museum, a term adopted originally at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in the United Kingdom, has gathered pace since its inception in 2002, suggesting new approaches to connecting people and artefacts, people of different cultures, human and nonhuman and scales of local and global. As the Oxford project has argued:

Ethnographic museums used to be seen as “us” studying “them.” A more productive approach is to view museums as trans-cultural artefacts composed of relations between the museum and its source communities.²

This project considers not just former “ethnographic museums” but also national museums, local museums, art museums and natural history museums that are sensitive to these principles. We do not define a “new museum” as a mold but rather see it as a curatorial practice that enables audiences and collections to be far more “ecological” and interconnected than the old-style museum.³ A relational museum develops its authority through supporting and curating networks of related things and their significance, rather than delivering knowledge from a single vantage point.

Museums are increasingly open to a flow in and out of the museum’s structure, where audiences and collections, curators and designers are all in conversation in a mutually informing way, sharing authority. Museums are no longer restricted to western knowledge conventions, becoming increasingly informed by perspectives of the cultural “Other.” Part of this project has been to develop collaborative ways of interpreting and relating to collections, rather than simply putting objects on display. Objects and collections are not merely observed and displayed in the relational museum, but are rather the pathways through which stories can flow. In the twenty-first-century museum, curation is not simply about working with repositories of inert curiosities, accumulations of the flotsam and jetsam of history and culture, but rather enabling the objects to live again and inform dialogues with peoples from many different backgrounds.

In the era of climate change, museums have begun to think about responsible and creative approaches to respond to the challenges of adaptation. This book demonstrates that museums have been, and can be, effective in contributing to the ontological and social transformations that are urgently needed, around the world, now. It is an experimental book, suitable for a time that demands powerfully creative, lateral, experimental thinking. Its experimental method is “curation,” a practice that includes bringing peoples, objects and stories into conversation, and in promoting a safe place to listen to perspectives from the objects and the cultures they subtend.

Engaging responsive communities

A key question for this book is: “how can museums collaborate in building communities able to engage with and respond to climate change?” Some museums have embraced the importance of public debate in strengthening civil society, seeing their role as providing and developing forums for the coming together of people with different perspectives on a particular issue. For some, this role has been conceptualized in a combative manner, with museum programs operating in a similar mode to television question-and-answer shows, pitting individuals from very different positions against each other. Such debates often result in a narrow scientific framing of the debate about climate change, and very little discussion of human responses to it. They degenerate into discussions of “causes,” rather than productive narratives for response.

The context for these discussions in the wider world is just as combative, locked into highly polarized positions, yet, as Mike Hulme has written, there are reasons why people disagree about climate change.⁴ The science is technical and easily misunderstood, sometimes deliberately, by journalists and those working as “merchants of doubt” on behalf of industry interests.⁵ Moreover, the social meanings of climate are different in different cultural contexts.

An alternative approach is to focus on how museums can create new communities over time by enabling people from different cultural and social positions to come more gently into relationship with each other, perhaps through the co-curation of objects, or using objects to stimulate events. Some institutions have created spaces and processes to enable community access that invite the performance and strengthening of cultural practices. This has been serving to connect present generations of communities with their ancestors as well as celebrating and sustaining subaltern and minority traditions within larger societies. The focus here is on the human response, putting the debate out of the hands of the polarizing forces of the blame game.⁶

Figure 1.1 In the storeroom: Wayne Ngata and others members of Toi Hauiti (Aotearoa New Zealand), visiting the American Museum of Natural History, April 2013. Photo: J. Newell.

Places of stories and collections

Museums, as places of calm, of reflection and of considered learning, hold considerable potential to open dialogues, where the focus is on the effects rather than the causes of climate change. There is power in a personal visit and in real collections to explore global scale changes at a human pace. Museums are places in which people can wander about at will without immediately being asked for their opinion on something. They are non-confrontational and allow time to absorb information in a way that allows responses to surface without being concerned about what others will think.⁷ Museums are institutions that can afford to step aside emotionally from convictions without compromising their identity. They are safe places that can help communities rethink and reinvent themselves better to meet the challenges of climate change.

Museums work through many modes: through the stories they tell, through the collections they mobilize and the exhibitions they launch. Stories are the means through which people make sense of themselves and the worlds they inhabit. Stories encode concepts about personhood, action and direction. They express ideas about value, authority and possibility, about the character of the past and its implications for the present and the future. To borrow a turn of phrase from Appadurai, stories express “the specific gravity and traction of the imagination,”⁸ as well as being deeply embodied in often-unconscious habits and practices. Consequently, they define how we act in the world.

Collections are valuable in many ways, as constructions of knowledge and experience, repositories of cultural memory, agents for cultural creativity, resources for scientific inquiry and records of ecologies. They have the capacity to create unique visual, kinesthetic and affective modes of perceiving and understanding the world. In other words, they create unique forms of material storytelling. And in a time where something seems to have gone awry in our human relationships with the world, the materiality of objects and collections seems particularly promising, replete with the capacity to reshape and recreate our place in the physical universe.

Collections, of course, occupy actual locations, they are in and of the world in no uncertain terms. This means that museums are as much about spaces as they are about collections themselves; whether these spaces are collection storage areas dominated by steel shelving and Solander boxes, exhibitions carefully crafted to contextualize and interpret objects in particular ways, entrance halls dignified by a single, keynote display or online environments enabling virtual visitors to find and explore digitized collections.

Exhibitions

Exhibitions remain the most significant and distinctive environments in museums of all sorts. They are, as the American performance studies scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett once wrote, the way in which “museums perform the knowledge they create.”⁹ Exhibitions are unique, three-dimensional places in which meaning is made as visitors move about within them, encountering and responding to various kinds of carefully positioned and inter-related things, such as artefacts, images, texts, sounds, footage, interactives, pools of light, display cases, walls, seats, windows, exits and other visitors. They are places that enable embodied learning, key to helping audiences develop their sense of how they are inter-connected with physical environments.

Exhibitions are the most distinctive way museums can engage with climate change. They bring together people and objects in ways that collapse past and present, near and far, eliding the linear chronologies of modernist progress. They invite understanding of how localized particularities become interwoven with broader geographies and trajectories.

Exhibitions also promote new modes of thinking and understanding, emphasizing associational and synthetic approaches that build abilities to consider how our choices, actions and lives are entangled with the other species and forces of the planet.¹⁰ Although it is difficult to find single objects that carry ideas on the scale of “climate change,” it is worth reflecting on the power of the object and the context of a visit. These are a form of “slow media” – by analogy with the slow food movement. G...