ICOM International Council of Museums - Museo Estancia Jesuitica ...

Un ¿nuevo? Paradigma en los museos históricos:
¿crisis de identidad?
Vilma Brondo, Mercedes Ferreyra, Silvana Lovay, Adriana Martinez,
Paola Roldan, Georgina Vallero – Argentina
Abstract
The world generated by the globalization let us to think about the existence of a new
paradigm marked by the deep need of the mankind to recognize itself as a social and an
individual being. The communications mediums and the process of globalization exers its
influence in the individuals and through them in the collective identity of the nations.
The museums, and particularly the historical one, know this reality and assume with
responsibility the need to build a singpost which created a historical belonging’s sense.
As a museum of social history, we recreate different historical sceneries –museological
representations- where, through a systematic investigation emerge and are highlighted
the protagonists and theirs goals and the role that they played in diverse historicalsocial
moments.
In fact, the Museum Estancia Jesuítica de Alta Gracia is searching for a model that
links the museographic and the historical discourse, no “solo de los hechos ocurridos,
sino también de sus relatos y sus prácticas comunicativas (not just a discourse of the
past facts, but also of their accounts and their commutative practices).
Based in Morales Moreno’s perspective about historic museographie, which is still now
“... cimentada en concepciones historiográficas y pedagógicas provenientes del mundo
liberal y positivista de fines del siglo XIX (... is still based on historiographic and
pedagogical notions from the liberal and positivist world of the end of the 19 th century)”,
our museum conceive the historical discourses as discourses which put the stress in
the past as process and where the identity not only amalgamate the multiple meanings
of the historical weave but also gave them a sense.
The Estancia Jesuítica de Alta Gracia, nowadays a house – museum, is synthesis and
testimony of several races, mentalities, traditions of Europeans, Africans, aborigines,
mestizos and Creoles. The cultural diversity mold their identity, an identity that didn’t
remain static but, on the contrary, was enriched and fortified in the course of the time
with another social actors that lived in others historical periods.
Having as a background a reality marked by a discredit of the past an the lack an
belonging, isn’t easy to built our identity. The construction of the identity, put us –
museum’s specialists- continuously in test. Although we observe concern the called
“inestabilidad identitaria (the instability of the identity)” -originated in the paradigm that
exist in this millennium- we consider this crisis as an element of transformation and
change and we are trying that the individuals and the social collective recognize
themself in the museum... “Al fin y al cabo, somos lo que hacemos para cambiar lo que
somos. La identidad no es una pieza de museo quitecita en la vitrina, sino siempre la
asombrosa síntesis de las contradicciones nuestras de cada día (At last we are what
we do, in order to change what we are. The identity isn’t a quiet museum’s object
exhibited in a glass showcase but the amazing synthesis of our daily contradictions)”.
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