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No 35 July COMCOL NEWSLETTER 2020 International Committee for Collecting Contemporary Collecting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Visiting the hairdressing salon in Espoo, Finland. Photo Espoo City Museum, Leena Sipponen Contents Letter from the Chair Danielle Kuijten 1 Conference Review, “What’s Missing? Letter from the Collecting and Exhibiting Europe” Laurie Cosmo 3 Chair Contemporary Collecting and COVID-19 Alexandra Bounia 8 Different ways to document COVID-19 pandemic: Danielle Kuijten Short Example from Espoo City Museum, Finland Riitta Kela 14 Call for Papers: an ethnology lab on the working of COVID-19 on Museums Dear members, 17 Summary of the debate on the new museum definition First of all, I want to speak some words to you, in this surreal Alina Gromova 18 time many are faced with a diversity of challenges, both COMCOL Members Survey 2020: professional and personal. We cannot see these separately as Definition they shape who we are and how we cope. !erefore I hope Alexandra Bounia and Danielle Kuijten 21 you, your families and friends are all safe and healthy, and COMCOL Members Survey 2020: that you "nd support both with those close to you but also A brief report on expectations and relations Alexandra Bounia and Danielle Kuijten 24 with your colleagues worldwide. 1 Editorial 28 COMCOLnewsletter / No 35 / July 2020 2 During the past months as we all had to deal with regulations to help "ght the virus, one of the commonalities was that most of us were con"ned in our homes and our institutes were faced with a long absence of visitors. Still the situations di#er from country to country, region to region. Many "rst needed to come to terms with working from home. Some were dealing with partners and children also being home. From here we started to look at our institutions and to act in order to stay visible for and to serve our visitors, although now doing this online. Followed by a phase where we see some institutions diving deeper into what it means to have an empty building while your audience is at home. What could we learn from this, from the behaviour of people, and translate to things we could do as institutions now but also in the future? In this journey we gathered a huge amount of experiences online, experimented with educational formats, stepped up to take on di#erent roles to serve local needs and we started to collect the pandemic. But not all of us got the space to experiment. We also saw cuts in sta# and uncertainties about whether institutions would survive for the future. If already the pandemic showed the inequalities and inequities within our societies, the Black Lives Matter protest movement in this period highlighted this even more. !e protests spread all over the world in a short time, to get clarity on what has happened and will keep you resulting in protests in many cities with large numbers of informed through email and our facebook page. people bringing it onto the streets. As a result these actions also pushed long heard discussions about representation Best wishes to all of you as we attempt to resume our and belonging into the forefront of discussion. Statues have ‘normal’ professional and personal lives’ literally fallen from their pedestals. Danielle Kuijten As collections people what can we do and what can we learn President ICOM COMCOL from actions such as collecting the pandemic, collecting Co-curator Imagine IC protests? What to do with the statues that have been re- moved? Which roles do we see for ourselves as museums [email protected] curators? What ethical questions do we ask ourselves? We are pleased to share with you our latest newsletter that touches upon some of these issues. Alina Gromova reports on the discussion ICOM Germany had on the museum de"nition earlier this year. We wrote an editorial on collecting the pandemic and have a report on the Conference “What’s Missing? Collecting and Exhibiting Europe” by Laurie Cosmo. Lastly we also did a short members survey at the beginning of the year which we would like to share a$er you. !is newsletter and its content was written before the current critical situation in the leadership of ICOM. !e COMCOL board will proceed the discussions with the boards of the other committees (national and international) COMCOLnewsletter / No 35 / July 2020 3 “What’s Missing? Collecting and Exhibiting Europe.” Conference organisers, led by MEK Director Dr. Elisabeth Tietmeyer and MEK Deputy Director Dr. Iris Edenheiser, focused on “blank spots,” which they described as “objects, narratives, methods and actors that have not been paid any (or enough) attention in museum re%ections on contemporary lives and societies in Europe.” Conference presenters included museum curators and directors, journalists, a visual artist, and ethnologists and anthropologists working throughout Europe, North America and Japan. !e museums with which they work ranged in type from what the organizers called “historical folklore, national and sometimes ethnically oriented to contemporary, European and transculturally designed institutions.” Considering that these institutions are undergoing transformations at the same time that the multicultural “European project” is increasingly called into question, Opening lecture by Suay Aksoy, conference organisers asked what social role such President of ICOM museums, especially those they called “former” folklife Photo Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum museums, wish to play amidst con%icting ideas about Europäischer Kulturen / Christian Krug European identity and cultural heritage. Assuming that contemporary museums and collections of everyday life must embrace social action, organisers sought to address ways that collections and exhibitions could Conference Review be reinterpreted through lenses of the marginalized, including post migratory, queer, post colonial, fugitive, “What’s Missing? disabled and other individuals and groups. Fi$een papers were delivered under four themes: “Global Europe,” “Towards the Transformation of Collecting and Collections of Everyday Culture”, “Methods and Structures”, and “Exhibiting Europe”. Additional panels Exhibiting Europe” included a conversation on diversity and social justice between well-known journalist and refugee advocate Ferda Ataman of Berlin and Dr. Susan Kamel, Professor Held at Museum of Museum Studies at the University of Applied Sciences Europäischer Kulturen - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 26 - 28 June 2019 Laurie Kalb Cosmo !e Museum Europäischer Kulturen - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (MEK), housed in the Berlin Dahlem Museum Center since 2011, turned 20 in June Evening reception 2019. It celebrated in grand style by hosting a two- Photo Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum day international conference from 26 - 28 June titled Europäischer Kulturen / Christian Krug COMCOLnewsletter / No 35 / July 2020 4 Berlin, and on a “One-Stop-Shop Archive of Forgotten An underlying theme of all the conference papers, Memories”, an initiative of the EU Horizon 2020 project no matter what panel they were in, was the tension called POEM (Participatory Memory Practices), which between absence and belonging: in terms of collections addresses strategies for envisioning socially inclusive that need a museum home, marginalised communities futures for Europe. Drs. Inge Zwart (University of that require a museum voice, or historic collections Uppsala), Franziska Mucha (University of Glasgow) that no longer belong to their settings. A few examples and Susanne Boersma (University of Hamburg/MEK) from the papers that addressed these themes are o#ered presented the project’s central questions and invited here. Regarding collections in search of a museum conference participants to actively take part — to create home, Dr. Erica Lehrer, Professor of History and Social a drawing or text of a memory they wished to forget; Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, attendees responded enthusiastically. !e MEK o#ered presented “Awkward Objects of Genocide,” an optional tours of its permanent exhibition “Cultural investigation of vernacular woodcarvings representing Contacts: Living in Europe”, a queer tour of the the Holocaust made by non-professional Polish artists, museum, and two temporary exhibitions “100 Percent which was part of the EU Horizon 2020 grant TRACES Wool” or “Wedding Dreams”. Dr. Suay Aksoy, President (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with of ICOM (International Council of Museums), opened the Arts). Lehrer described the “awkward” status of the conference with a keynote lecture “What’s Missing: these objects in museums, where folk art typically is Sticking to the Margins,” in which she focused on the unconnected to history or di&cult subjects. In another value of museums as among the most trusted institutions paper “!e Impossibility of ‘Blank Spot Europe’” with in the world, and how, referring to UNESCO and ICOM Dr. Anna Schmid, Director of Museum der Kulturen mandates, they have the responsibility and power to Basel (from 1994 to 1996 called Museum of Ethnology establish dialogue between cultures and build bridges and Swiss Museum for Folk Culture), emphasised how for a peaceful world. Dr. Sharon Macdonald, Professor Europe, or “the idea of Europe,” must be part of the in Social Anthropology at Humboldt University, Berlin, material inventory of ethnography museums, especially renowned scholar of di&cult heritage, and founder of because Europe as a point of view is always there, even the university’s Centre for Anthropological Research on if not explicitly acknowledged. Schmid