Introduction
This chapter examines a critical moment of transition in Morocco's national museum landscape. While many national museums in African countries are the direct product of nation-building campaigns of the mid-twentieth century, the Moroccan state has only recently acknowledged the symbolic potential of the public museum as a space for communicating ideas about the nation. By royal decree (dahir) of April 18, 2011, King Mohammed VI of Morocco (r. 1999âpresent) affirmed the creation of a new National Foundation for Museums (Fondation nationale des musĂ©es, FNM), a private not-for-profit association that manages 14 public museums, including 3 new museums alongside 11 which were formerly administered by Morocco's Ministry of Culture. Created only three months prior to the king's ratification of a constitutional referendum in July 2011, the FNM is an important initiative put forward to express a new relationship between the Moroccan state and its citizens, one based on the principles of cultural pluralism and democratic participation.
The 2011 referendum endorsed by King Mohammed VI newly defines Morocco as a âunited stateâ with a decentralized territorial organization, designed to ensure the balance and separation of powers as well as the âparticipative democracy of the citizenryâ (Royaume du Maroc 2011a, article 1). Furthermore, it acknowledges the country's plural identities and histories in an unprecedented way, describing a Moroccan national identity âforged through the convergence of its Arab-Islamic, Amazigh, and Saharan-Hassanic components, nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic, and Mediterranean influencesâ (Royaume du Maroc 2011a, pbml). Echoing these sentiments in his introductory letter for the FNM's website, the foundation's president, Mehdi Qotbi, extols Morocco's cultural diversity and expresses the FNM's commitment to ensuring âthe preservation and enrichment of Morocco's patrimony, on the one hand, and the democratization of culture and its accessibility to all of [Morocco's] citizens, on the otherâ (Qotbi 2017). Through these terms, Morocco's national museum network is slated to become an important site for cultural expression that, importantly, will be financially and ideologically supported by the nation's leaders.
To fully grasp the significance of this recent development, it is important to understand the place of the public museum in Morocco prior to this moment. Inheriting a system of regional museums of ethnography, archaeology and âindigenous artsâ established in accordance with the French and Spanish protectorates' preservationist campaigns in Morocco (1912â1956), successive cultural administrations struggled to integrate the country's museums with shifting post-independence notions of national identity and development. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, few public museums had been created and little had changed in the presentation and content of Morocco's colonial-turned-national museums. As we discuss in the first part of this chapter, for many museum professionals and their publics in Morocco, the inadequate infrastructure of the national museum network reflected the state's failure to recognize culture as a public service (Massaia 2013). In 2006, Sakina Rharib, an anthropologist and former director of the Museum of Marrakech, argued that museums continued to occupy a marginal place within Moroccan society due to a âlack of genuine political will to inscribe the museum, and cultural heritage in general, on the plan for a modern and democratic societyâ (Rharib 2006, 101).
Rharib's commentary points to a central critique leveraged against Morocco's public museums: that they are invisible institutions, both at the level of public policy and public awareness in Morocco. In her study of the place of museums in the postcolonial Moroccan imagination, Katarzyna Pieprzak reveals that local evaluations of Morocco's museums are predominated by narratives of failure and decay and the claim that âon a fundamental level there are no museums in Moroccoâ (Pieprzak 2010, xiv). In this light, the king's official patronage of the national museum networkâalongside a host of programs oriented toward the promotion of arts and culture in Moroccoâis itself an important symbolic gesture. Indeed, one of the primary objectives of the FNM is to enhance the presence of the national Moroccan museum network, both domestically and abroad. It proposes to do so through the introduction of major infrastructural changes impacting collections management, training, personnel and funding structures, in combination with an aggressive publicity campaign.
But visibility is not an end in itself. The role that the public museum might play in supporting democracy in Morocco will depend on what the national museum makes visible and, even more, who has the power to control this visibility. In Exhibiting Cultures, Ivan Karp explains that in the public life of museums â[t]he struggle is not only over what is to be represented, but over who will control the means of representingâ (Karp 1991, 15). In addressing this problem, we not only examine the museum exhibition as a means of representing but also evaluate how the infrastructure of the museum itself configures access to representation and communicates these processes to the public.
In the second part of the chapter, we consider the relationship between visibility and democracy in the space of the national museum and evaluate the FNM's initial activities according to these interrelated concepts. We conclude with the hypothesis that the primary role of the renovated national museum network in Morocco, as so far conceived by the FNM and its elite supporters, is to represent a cohesive national image based in narratives of democracy, cultural diversity and tolerance rather than to facilitate true democratic access to cultural representation. Participatory democracy in the space of the museum would entail a decentralization of the network's infrastructure and a willingness to support divergent voices and difficult conversations. Such initiatives have so far been overshadowed by the FNM's prioritization of programs supporting Morocco's cultural diplomacy.
