March 31, 2015. Organized by Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale, Tervuren/Brussels.
The workshop „Collection as Source of Identification“ in Brussels (BE) introduced to the overall themes of the SWICH-project offering an exploration of what kind of strategies have worked most efficiently to foster engagement and interest. Here you can find a detailed documentation of this event.
Programme organized by Isabelle Van Loo, Bambi Ceuppens, Els Cornelissen and Katia Dewulf
“Collections as Source of Identification was the first workshop within the frame of SWICH and thus offered a first glimpse into what the project focusses on.
The MRAC in Tervuren invited experienced speakers to discuss and present different modes of collaboration and co-creation between communities and ethnographic museums.
After introductory presentations by Barbara Plankensteiner and Guido Gryseels, the first half of the day was dedicated to the multiple diaspora communities the MRAC currently collaborates with. In her lecture “Collections as a source of identification?”, Bambi Ceuppens from MRAC elaborated on the challenges and problems the museum faced in the past when working with young Belgian-Congolese. Billy Kalonji (Association Mwinda Kitoko) and Kalvin Soiresse Njall (Collectif Mémoire Coloniale et lutte contre les Discriminations) further presented the point of view of community members in the process of collaborating with the museum. This topic was addressed as well by Gratia Pungu from “Le groupe des six”, she described the role of the group in the rebuilding process of the MRAC and the problems they faced so far. Questions such as “what parts of the museum collections are relevant and interesting for young Belgian-Congolese?”, “how can communities be involved in the restructuring of such an institution?”, “how can we make ethnographic collections speak to all members of society” or “is the involvement of communities only a fig leaf or do community members really have an impact on the decisions in museums?” were discussed in the morning session.
In the early afternoon Stéphanie Mahieu and Jean-Barthélémi Debost from the “Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration” in Paris presented their museum and reflected on the project “Galérie des Dons (Gallery of gifts)” where they collected objects from people with migrant background in Paris.
The writer Mike Phillips introduced his current research and his work within the project Tate Encounters. Aimé Ntakiyica, a visual artist, presented various artworks where he deals with topics such as identity, globalisation or his roots in Burundi.
To conclude the workshop, representatives of all SWICH partners shared their thoughts and experiences connected to the topics discussed earlier. The partners emphasised that the preconditions for working with communities differ in each country: the collaborations mostly depend on both the origins of the different museum collections and the communities active in the respective cities. However, questions such as "Which communities share a history with the different museums?", "How can museums overcome their differing colonial pasts?" or "Which kind of objects do we have to collect to represent contemporary realities?" were of importance for most of the guests from the different European museums.
