MEDIATING THE FUTURE: MEMORY AND ARCHIVES IN MUSEUM EDUCATION - fully booked
- October, 25 | 16:30 - 17:30
- Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli - MANN
A project by Sara Torres-Vega, Artist and Educator
In collaboration with ART DAYS
From the Latin "ark", (as in the expression "Noah's ark") derives the word archive: a floating container prepared to preserve and guard what must be saved when the flood comes. It rains (and a lot) on museum education: precarization, unfair contracts, invisibilization... The water is rising.
In the ark of what we call culture, we ask ourselves, will museum education be saved in this flood or will we perish under water?
The memory and archive of museum education could very well be left out of the ark of cultural institutions. But whether we have a place in the ark or build an ark of our own, we may not yet know what our boxes contain, or how we will decide what goes in and what doesn't. And it will be of little use to have hidden boxes without governance or rituals of opening and contestation.
In our boxes we have found a pine tree, a shoe, a letter hidden in an old book, photographs... that with difficulty coexist with the opening protocols, latex gloves or restricted access typical of formal archives. More than an archive we look for somewhere to be because of the need to be in the warmth of a brazier, and because of the desire to be in the proximity of those who we know will bring nutritious things to the table.
This workshop will be divided into three parts. The first one called ark will dive into different museum education archives in search of what prior generations have kept for us to learn from. A second part will consist of a practical toolkit for archiving museum education from a situated perspective. The third part will consist of a gathering to think of the key questions that guide the archival research and participatory archiving practices.
