Museums as places for intercultural dialogue - Network of European ...

The challenge of creating “third spaces”Guidelines for MAP for ID pilot projectsSimona Bodoexchange of culturally different practices, and help immigrants retainawareness of their cultural background. It could actually be arguedthat the promotion of museums as places for intercultural dialogue isa gradual process which could be disrupted without first having takenthese important, preliminary steps.What I rather wish to emphasise is that alongside the more establishedcultural policy responses to the growing diversity of European societies,and ideally as their culmination, there is also a strong need forstrategies and programmes aimed at creating ‘third spaces, unfamiliarto both [sides], in which different groups can share a similar experienceof discovery,’ 4 which comes very close to understanding interculturaldialogue as a process rather than as a goal.Guidelines established for the MAP for ID pilot projectsFrom these reflections, a number of guidelines emerged which wereadopted by MAP for ID partners in order to inform their work and toinspire the museums involved in the experimentation of new planningand operational paradigms.Needless to say, because each one of these museums was at adifferent stage of the gradual process I just referred to – some wereindeed at their first experience of “intercultural” work – the guidelinesthat follow were to be contextualised in order to capitalise on previousinitiatives, reflect the museum’s current situation, and possibly take itone step further.They include a number of key underlying assumptions, conceptualclarifications and methodological criteria:• Understanding intercultural dialogue as a bi-directional processactively engaging both autochthonous individuals and those with animmigrant background, which is ‘dialogical and transformative onboth sides,’ 5 and in which all are equal participants;• Embracing a dynamic, dialogical notion of “heritage,” wheremeanings can be renegotiated, re-constructed and made availablefor all to share in a social space of interaction;• Starting from the assumption that “the past is a foreign country,”therefore all segments of the population – not only migrants andrefugees – suffer from a lack of cultural or historical knowledge;• Conceiving intercultural education as the “integrating background”against which any education is possible in a world of increasingcontact and interaction between culturally different practices, ratherthan as a compensatory activity exclusively addressed to migrantindividuals;Intercultural dialogue as an end or as a process? Policyapproaches in museums across EuropeIn 2007, ERICarts Institute carried out a study on intercultural dialoguefor the European Commission – DG Education and Culture. Asa research team expert, my brief was to investigate the differentunderstandings of intercultural dialogue and the resulting policyapproaches to its promotion in museums across Europe, focusing onwhether and how interaction has (or has not) been promoted betweendifferent groups. 1From this overview 2 three main policy models clearly emerged, whichmay be very roughly summed up as follows:• Showcasing difference: a “knowledge-oriented” multiculturalismintended as an educational strategy to inform the autochthonouspublic about “other” cultures which have traditionally beenmisrepresented or made invisible in our museums;• Integrating “new citizens” within mainstream culture, by helpingthem to learn more about a country’s history, language, values andtraditions;• Promoting cultural self-awareness in migrant communities(especially refugees and asylum seekers) through “culturally specific”programming.While it is not at all surprising to see how differently museums haveresponded to such an unusual challenge – far from being developedfor the sake of cultural diversity or in order to enhance interculturalcompetence, most of them were historically created to represent andvalidate national or local identities – it is quite interesting to observethat, as different as they may be, these approaches to the promotion ofintercultural dialogue often have some key features in common:• They still tend to have a static, essentialist notion of “heritage,”which is primarily seen as a “received patrimony” to safeguard andtransmit;• They target communities exclusively in relation to their own culturesand collections, while cross-cultural interaction across all audiencesis generally avoided;• By keeping “majority” and “minority” cultures or communities apart,and by generally treating the latter as ‘unified, traditional, unchangingand thereby exotic,’ 3 they sometimes end up reinforcingstereotypes;• They are inclined to embrace the rhetoric of “diversity as arichness,” rather than identifying tensions and frictions which may bedealt with in order to change attitudes and behaviours;• They conceive intercultural dialogue as a goal or pre-determinedoutcome, rather than as an interactive process.By highlighting these common features, I do not wish to imply that thepolicy approaches outlined above are not correct or worth pursuing;in fact all are essential, in their own distinctive way, to promote therichness of diversity, create the conditions for the encounter and22 23