Migrants in museums. Proposals for seriously addressing an extremely important topic

TheEuropean Agenda for the Integration of Third-Country Nationals, an important document adopted by the European Commission in July 2011, defines integration as a process that aims to get migrants to participate in the society of their host country, with all the implications that follow: providing accommodation for migrants, respecting their rights and culture, informing them of their obligations, and getting them in turn to give evidence that they respect the rules and values of the society in which they live. Integration (which, of course, does not have to be mere absorption: Europe, the agenda text goes on to say, must know how to manage diversity and multiculturalism) is a complicated process, but one that, at the same time, can be worked out as a “driver of economic development and social cohesion, so that immigrants can further contribute to economic growth and cultural richness.” There are many challenges involved in integration, and the agenda, in its opening, listed some of them: increasing the employment level of the immigrant force, combating the risk of social exclusion, smoothing out disparities in terms of school learning, and addressing public apprehension over poor levels of integration. It is a process that involves society as a whole, and from which museums cannot feel exempt: the topic of museums and migrants therefore deserves to be explored in depth and, above all, to play a leading role in the public debate around culture. It is, after all, an issue that many museums have long forced themselves to address, given its very high importance (and some museums have even felt the problem earlier than other sectors of society).

An importance that, as is obvious to imagine, lies in the role that museums play in the life of cities, especially those most exposed to the flows of migrants that have necessarily triggered remarkable transformations within urban contexts, as well as significant social impacts. Within these processes, museums can and must play a considerable function of mediation, since they represent places capable of uniting the various social components of a city, they are devices capable of providing the analytical tools to understand the transformations themselves, they can represent a meeting point between communities, they ignite participatory dynamics. Museums, in essence, cannot but be considered privileged actors in the debate on migration: migrations that, of course, do not represent a new phenomenon, but have characterized the entire history of humanity. What changes, if anything, are the particular motives and compositions of the flows. A full understanding of the phenomenon, in all its aspects, is therefore the basis for dealing with it in the most useful and serene way possible: “migrants,” wrote researchers Pieter Bevelander and Christina Johansson in the introduction to a recent book on the subject of “migrants and museums,” “are not a detached group: they are part of a whole, with important implications for all sectors of society and for the understanding of what characterizes ’us.’ Social structures, institutions, individual and group characteristics of both migrants and residents necessarily affect the development of society. Inequalities in the labor market, housing policies, education and health care, as well as political representation, are key areas for immigration studies.”

The relevant literature has produced several contributions on the topic, always keeping in mind that the goal is for culture to become an effective vehicle for inclusion. It is unquestionable that, in order for integration to take place, the utmost clarity is needed and, above all, the participation of all, migrants and residents, without any possible areas of conflict, or any elements capable of acting negatively on the perception of those who still struggle to accept this reality. On this issue, mention should be made of a recent contribution by Jill Cousins and Beth Daley published in the special issue of Cartaditalia magazine dedicated to theEuropean Year of Cultural Heritage 2018, in which they note that “migration is often perceived as a negative or problematic reality” since the arrival of “others” in a third country is seen as a threat against the identity and stability of the country itself: for this reason, they emphasize that a positive attitude toward migration is a basic condition for an effective intercultural dialogue to take place between migrants and local communities. Cousins and Daley suggest taking, as a starting point, the realization that our society is also “the product of many cultural influences” and that “our cultural heritage is evidence that the Europe in which we live today is the result of a varied flow of people and ideas and that migration is an integral part of our daily lives and enriches them in many ways.” And cultural heritage is an important lever in the process of rapprochement that precedes integration as a tool that reveals to local communities what lies behind their identity.

Moments from a meeting involving locals and migrants at Museum Rotterdam, Netherlands

However, taking the point of view of museums (if we want to start from the museum as a place that holds part of our cultural heritage), we need to ask ourselves how to think of a museum model that can be effective in bringing intercultural dialogue to life. At this point it is useful to refer to a well-known 1997 study by the U.S. anthropologist James Clifford, who applied to museums the concept of contact zones introduced in 1992 by his colleague Mary Louise Pratt, who had adopted this expression to define those spaces of encounter “in which geographically and historically separated populations come into contact with one another, establishing unbroken relationships, usually triggering conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and conflicts that are difficult to manage.” For Pratt, who was thinking primarily of colonial or postcolonial conflicts, the term “contact” emphasizes the “interactive and extemporaneous dimensions of imperial encounters so easily ignored or repressed by accounts of conquest and domination told from the perspective of the invaders,” and to see such encounters from the perspective of “contact” is to view relations not in terms of “separation, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, intertwining of knowledge and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical power relations.” Contact zones can thus be read, quoting museologist Giovanni Pinna, for several years president of ICOM Italy, as “areas in which the meeting of cultures takes place in a relationship of subordination, in which phenomena of critique, collaboration, mediation and denunciation develop, bilingualism and vernacular expressions are developed, parodies and imaginary dialogues are created, but also phenomena of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, dead letters, unread masterpieces and absolute heterogeneity of positive thoughts.” These are, in other words, areas where contact generates the creation of new cultures. Clifford, in his 1997 essay, described a meeting held at the Portland Art Museum in 1989, during which a group of Tlingit, Native Americans from the coast on the U.S.-Canadian border, were invited to participate in a discussion of the institution’s ethnographic collections. The result was that museum staff and Native Americans viewed the objects in the collections from radically different perspectives: the encounter-clash between two different cultures had produced a contact zone. “The museum,” Clifford emphasized, “was being called upon to assume responsibilities that went beyond mere preservation. It was called upon to act on behalf of the Tlingit communities, and not simply to represent the history of their objects fully or accurately. A kind of reciprocity was required of the museum.” The museum, in essence, was to become a place of contact and lasting relationships, capable of benefiting all the cultures that the institution includes.

One of the requirements of the museum as an area of contact, Pinna further emphasized, is “the possibility of developing relationships of autoethnographic exchange and reciprocity between the intersecting subjects, and the capacity for self-interpretation of the community of reference.” This is certainly not an easy goal to achieve, also because, wanting to place the discourse within a historical dimension, many museums were born as symbols of a dominant culture (think of the many collections born, precisely, in colonial times, or those that have become elements of national identity). However, it should be considered that although “many museums still take part in the processes that create and recreate national identities” (Bevelander and Johansson), in recent years their roles have undergone momentous changes and have drastically branched out. In particular, museums have begun to think much more about themselves, adopting new policies, reconsidering their approach to the public, the way they produce culture, and the ethical implications of their actions (think of the very recent debate on cultural decolonization): Eilean Hooper-Greenhill has spoken of “post-museums” in relation to those institutions that rethink themselves and reshape their action, abandoning the single point of view and, conversely, making the knowledge preserved within their walls no longer “unified and monolithic, but fragmented and multivocal,” also taking an interest in intangible heritage, or even getting out of the building and meeting communities on the ground. These processes obviously occur following different bases and timelines, or change depending on the type and size of the institution, but it is an objective fact that the landscape is undergoing profound changes.

A document produced between 2015 and 2016 by the Network of European Museum Organizations (NEMO) and titled Museums, migration and cultural diversity sought to take stock of how museums are changing and, specifically, how they should approach the new migratory phenomenaî, emphasizing that a “museum for all” is perhaps a utopia, but that “a museum for as many as possible” should become a reality, and thus taking care to provide institutions with a series of recommendations to make the processes concrete. The basis is a reconsideration of collections: that is, the museum should reexamine and re-explore, according to the NEMO report, its collections by asking itself what origins they have had so as to “reconstruct and de-construct” the original contexts of the collections in order to “open new perspectives” and “create new settings for their display.” Museums, the report continues, should view exhibitions as opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue (exhibitions often provide opportunities to address specific issues and are therefore particularly well suited to initiate discussion): “Measuring oneself against exhibitions encourages the formation of personal opinions and can spark conversations among visitors, helping them to develop an understanding of similarities and differences. Exhibitions can make visible the history and presence of people with or without migration stories behind them.” And they create the ideal ground for people to compare different points of view. Getting down to specifics, the report gives the example of exhibitions on topics such as love, family and work, which could be investigated or presented in terms of diversity of meaning. But the discourse can also extend to permanent collections, with targeted focuses (to be fleshed out through additional apparatuses, perhaps in languages that appeal to new migrant communities, or through digital tools) that allow for long-term work to be brought to life. Again, museums should leverage their education sectors to stimulate interest in migration-related issues (with activities focused on these issues, if not with specific programs). Changes could then also affect guided tours (a purpose that certainly requires an open-minded attitude and flexibility, the NEMO paper points out): that is, there could be a move away from traditional tours in the form of a monologue by the guide and experiment with new forms of tours based on dialogue (and perhaps, the paper suggests, make this type of tour part of the museum’s educational methodology). Museums should then take steps to address new target audiences: in fact, museums often do not reach all strata of a society or all communities that animate the life of a city, perhaps because they do not open up enough or do not sufficiently consider the potential of certain projects. And to reach new audiences, communication, the ability to find effective means and to succeed in conveying what the museum has to offer, is essential. Research, planning, studying audiences, opening up new communication channels, training, participation and ongoing relationships are the keys to making good intentions a reality.

Several museums have already initiated best practices that could provide some examples to other institutions. In Rotterdam, the local Museum Rotterdam, the main civic museum of the large Dutch port city, as part of an exhibition on diversity, created discussion tables in which residents, refugees, homeless people, and students took part in dialogues that took place in an informal, almost convivial manner on issues related to the exhibition. In Frankfurt, theHistorisches Museum Frankfurt initiated the CityLab project, through which the institute set itself the goal of extending research outside the walls of the museum, inside the city, to learn how a city as large and modern as Frankfurt is perceived by its inhabitants, thus seeking answers among the inhabitants themselves, collecting their stories, animating meetings, workshops, city walks, and organizing exhibitions (and of course migrants were an integral part of the project: their stories, like those of the locals, became part of the museum’s library collections, in a special section). In Manchester, by contrast, the Manchester Art Gallery organizes free English courses aimed at small groups of ten people each. In London, the Battersea Arts Centre has animated a festival, London Stories: made by migrants, entirely dedicated to true stories of migrants, each with his or her own background, who have arrived and settled in the English capital (some for work, others for love, many to flee wars and persecution). In Italy, the Egyptian Museum in Turin, in our country one of the most attentive to the issue, has organized meetings and conferences aimed at museum workers and professionals to deepen the discourse on the tools needed to deal with working with migrants in museums (training is essential). In Naples, the National Archaeological Museum organizes workshops that involve the active involvement of migrants, and sometimes even free tours aimed at groups of migrants. Those who want to find numerous other case studies on the topic of “migrants and museums” can go to the Migration: Cities platform, which collects many interesting case studies on the topic.

Involving migrants, making them participate in the life of museums, making them part of the community that gathers around the museum, is a challenge of great importance: if it is true that migrations represent an asset for European cities, it is necessary to prepare the spaces so that such an asset can be created in the most profitable way. Museums are an important part of the process, and it is worth concluding by quoting an interview with Marlen Mouliou, co-coordinator of the aforementioned Migration: Cities project, published in February 2017 in the Journal of Foundations. When asked whether museums are aware that they have a responsibility in the area of migrationî, Mouliou responded by stating that “some museums found that they have this responsibility a long time ago, while others are only now realizing it. Today museums are being called upon to take a stand against racism and all forms of discrimination. Many colleagues from around the world speak of museum resistance and activism by referring to the need for museums not to remain neutral, otherwise they run the risk of becoming complicit in the production of discrimination and inequality.” And to address the issue in the most appropriate manner, Mouliou reiterated that “museums must become engines of active citizenship, connecting government, migrants and society so that diversity is accepted and positive change can take place. As a starting point, museums must think critically, deconstruct their narrative models and create new narratives capable of telling multiple points of view.”

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