Monday 18 November 2024: Key note speeches (Auditorium)

Cultural heritage, experienced either within or beyond the museums’ walls, is related not only to cultural memory and social identity (local, national, gender, religious, ethnic or other), as many scholars have shown in the last decades, but also inevitably to conflict. Heritage is ultimately at the heart of this matter: it causes opposition, ambiguity, memory wars, or even physical destruction, whereas at the same time, it may serve as a platform for resistance, healing, reconciliation, and peacebuilding. This is also the case in Greece where the management, perception and museum display of the country’s acclaimed antiquities –long invoked in the name of national and Western values – have been far from uncontested and smoothly run. On the contrary, their very materiality often causes ferocious discussions, efforts to commemorate or forget traumas, and, not least, the performance of power relations with regard to evocative claims of the past. Yet can such discourses pave the path for innovative educational practices concerning the interpretation of cultural heritage, thus enabling meaningful insights into different people’s identities, ideas, and attitudes both in the past and the present? 

In my speech I will attempt to problematize conflicting uses of Greek archaeological sites, monuments, landscapes, objects, and museum practices. Inspired by recent advances in museology and social theory, I will argue that “difficult” heritage has a great educational potential for the development of empathy and critical historical thinking as well as for the endorsement of a more sensitive attitude towards social “otherness” (both in time and space) in a fragmented, unequal and, at the end of the day, “difficult” society.

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Esther Solomon is Associate Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Ioannina. She studied archaeology, museology and social anthropology in Greece, Italy and the UK and has worked as museologist for the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and as museum educator and exhibition curator for museums and other cultural organizations in Greece and abroad.

Her combination of academic and practical work extends into public cultural programs, museum activism, collections interpretation, and training of museum professionals and volunteers. Specialized in ethnographic approaches to material culture, Esther Solomon has published widely on museum and exhibition theory, public archaeology and “difficult” heritage.

e-mail: estersol@hotmail.com, esolomon@uoi.gr

Can the museum contribute to alleviating, or even curing, the ills of body and mind? Two trends are emerging and converging: the caring museum and museotherapy.

A synergy of factors is currently sparking the interest of museums in actions at the crossroads of science, the arts and health, in a field that is currently booming. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been countless initiatives to reach out to a public confined by a climate of anxiety. Faced with these challenges, museums respond to the essential need for well-being in our societies, in line with the World Health Organization definition: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." While so-called "hard" or "true" medicine remains irreplaceable, it remains partial when it does not integrate a holistic and sociocultural dimension: treatment cannot focus solely on the symptom, because the doctor is treating a person. Taking into account the functional, psychological, cognitive and social consequences of vulnerability has become a public health issue.

Museotherapy defines the use of visual arts and museums to promote the mental, physical, and social health of individuals and populations. The modalities of this citizen museology are based on participative strategies around the encounter between an individual, a therapist, and a work of art. It offers a multi-disciplinary framework for each museum to reflect on its therapeutic potential for better collective practices. In this logic of health democratization coupled with cultural democratization, the museum supports a strategic axis of public health policies. Reconsidering the biological and experiential visitor, our need for "beauty," or at the very least, aesthetic feeling, is physiological, not just philosophical, or cultural.

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Nathalie Bondil has been Museum and Exhibitions director at the Arab World Institute (IMA) in Paris since 2021. This internationally museologist and art historian is responsible for rethinking this museum for 2027. French and Canadian, she was the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts director (2007-2020), where she led several expansion projects, as well as intercultural and interdisciplinary exhibitions. In educational action and health research, she is recognized for her commitment for a more inclusive museum: Pavilion for Peace with its International art therapy and educative wing in 2016; medical museum prescription in 2018;  Arts for the One-World wing in 2019. She teaches museotherapy as "sage" for the Université de Montréal, the École du Louvre and the Institut national du patrimoine, Paris. Vice-Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts (2014-2021), member of ICOM-France Board of Directors, she is recipient of various awards and doctorates.