The costume allows approaches that go beyond history, design and industry. At the National Costume Museum we aim for a strategy that also considers fashion as individual expression, collective affirmation and multicultural narration, what increases the museum's social commitment and includes it in contemporary issues. Are more visitors expected? Yes, but especially more diverse audiences, co-producer and involved in more impactful experiences.
We want a more accessible museum, one that promotes Debate, but goes further, through Action on current issues, such as multiculturalism, inclusion, mental health and sustainability. The aim is a museum that cooperates in the development of society, changing minds and behaviours.
These are our strategic goals: Increase the connection with society, respecting social and cultural diversity, contributing to education, personal development, active citizenship and mitigating social inequalities; Increase audience diversity through exhibitions, mediation and educational actions that call for multidisciplinary cultural proposals, participation of new publics and greater social responsibility; Promote physical, cognitive and emotional accessibility, seeking to guarantee equal opportunities and inclusion conditions for all citizens; Contribute to a behavioural change, towards sustainability and good resource management.
How to be a museum “of all colours and shapes”, where objects and their stories get “interlaced and humanized”? These challenges are being worked on at the National Costume Museum; we’ll share projects developed 2022-2024, focused on: more accessible and inclusive exhibition (ex: PhD project “Traje para Todos”, by A.M. Valente; exhibition “The Skin We Chose”, Fashion Revolution Portugal); education and mediation actions (Museum belongs to a Community Group dedicated to groups at risk of social isolation and youth delinquency; project “We are not always what we wear”); workshops promoted by citizens with disabilities; education and awareness sessions about the connections between clothing and the contemporary world (“16 Days of Activism to End Violence against Women and Girls” campaign; “Inclusive Fashion” – talks at the Museum and at the School; talks with young activists who warn about the threats of fast fashion and invite to sustainable fashion practices, such as swap markets); professional training (blind trainees, in textile technology); volunteering (volunteers with disabilities in gardening work)
How do Ethnological Museums in Thrace manage multiple cultural identities, sensitive memories and oral histories associated with their collections in terms of museum education? Can museum educators process traumatic post-memories to encourage new glances on the past within the framework of the present multicultural landscape of Thrace? How could museums talk to teenagers about sensitive memories and make the traumatic past experienced by their ancestors' matter for them? Is it possible for post-memories to be depicted in a multimodel museum text?
As a case study, we attempt to interpret various untold and unseen aspects of local history, post-memories, traumas, narratives and cultural identity of the descendants of the refugee and exchanged populations of the beginning of the 20th century through an innovative museum educational programme combining the collaboration/interaction of teenagers with their grandparents, by using multiliteracies to encourrage the creative production of multimodel texts within a museum exhibition.
The programme takes place in a Folk Museum based in the village of Xylagani Rhodope/Thrace, inhabited by Greek refugee populations from Northern and Eastern Thrace, who enacted a forced transfer after the Asia Minor Catastrophe. In 2024 the village completes 100 years of its material and intangible culture and the presented educational programme is part of the local memorial and cultural celebrations.
The current ethnographic collection of the Xylagani museum consists of the refugees' personal belongings (mainly donations to the museum)- stronly connected with their personal traumatic experience by their forced transfer from their homeland. These objects receive by their descendants in the context of the commemorative educational programme alternative and new (post) memories, interpretation, symbolism, emotions and narrations, revealing the various and complex aspects of exhibits strongly connected to sensitive memories and matters.
With the growing emphasis on Indigenous rights, ethnic consciousness, and identity development internationally since the 1980s, museums have begun to reflect on the historical representation of Indigenous people and prioritize the presentation of their histories of contact, difficult histories, and contemporary issues, emphasizing narratives of change and complexity.
This study takes the permanent exhibition of the National Museum of Taiwan History as a case study. Employing exhibition analysis and focus groups as research methods, this study interviewed 10 Indigenous and 6 Han Chinese visitors to examine how they interpret the Indigenous history presented in the permanent exhibition.
The study points out that presenting Indigenous history in museums carries multiple meanings, not only fostering dialogue, evoking empathy, and offering a space for reflection, but also promoting communication between communities and seeking reconciliation with the past through dialogue. Although the exhibition employs various display strategies to present multiple perspectives on history, when facing the vast permanent exhibition, guided tours and dialogues with specific themes can further aid visitors from different cultural backgrounds in understanding Indigenous history.
This study will systematically synthesize the factors that lead Indigenous exhibitions to trigger cross-cultural dialogue, and how cross-cultural audiences generate dialogue through exhibitions and the patterns of such dialogue. Through dialogue, it observes and deepens the understanding of cross-cultural relationships.
In our presentation we approach the subject through case examples from our museums. We discuss how we have handled problematic topics, like domestic and sexual violence, infant mortality, power and abuse of power and myths or preconceptions of greatness in two of our museums.
The museums we are talking about are Turku Castle and Luostarinmäki Museum Quarter. Two very different places with different stories. The castle is one of Finland’s most well-known places, with a history of power. Whereas Luostarinmäki is an open air museum with small wooden houses that used to be on the outskirts of the city, and home to the less wealthy population.
We want the exhibition and educational content in both museums to be relatable to modern people: to stir emotions and strengthen the understanding of the past by sharing the stories of the authentic people who once lived in these buildings. One of the main goals in telling the hidden stories was to bring up the resilience of the people in the past and show them as something else than just names from the past, to give them life through the exhibitions.
To make the people more relatable we started writing two different kinds of texts, one more traditional, and the other partly fictional. Based on real facts from sources we wrote glimpses of the lives of these people. Always balancing between what we know as facts and what we can assume and always remembering that we are dealing with real historical people and must be both sensitive and honest to them. We are also giving some of them a voice through short audio stories or videos. We consider exhibitions contents to be a part of the education and audience engagement.
While working on new exhibitions in old museums, that have for decades had a traditional and, in some ways, conservative way of telling the past, our focus has shifted. The museums previously told a somewhat different story, not letting the people, at least not the ordinary, play a big role. We have now concentrated more on the people who have lived or been active in these places and we are trying to find out as much about them as possible, that includes the more problematic and not so flattering aspects that have been left out before.
Diverse and relatable life stories arise from history and deepen the audience's experience. By opening varying perspectives to the past, in our museums, we aim to broaden our relationship with the audience.
Athens has been the second city chosen by UNESCO to hold its seminar on the Role of Education in Museums following that in Brooklyn. Were the issues less delicate than the ones museums have to deal with nowadays? What about the topics analyzed during the CECA annual conference in Nafplion and Athens in 1988 on the role of museum education departments from their implementation, their ruling and maintainance? Which role has the city of Athens played in encouraging the creation of new education departments in Greek museums and which difficult issues have they tackled? How have political difficulties been dealt with in the Greek museums in the 1970's and how important and crucial has Melina Mercouri's role been regarding museums and their role in society.For me all the new issues strongly discussed by all ICOM members towards the new museum definition were clearly present but not defined as they are nowadays. Going back to the report of the 1954 meeting and the proceedings of the 1988 conference show many examples of participation and inclusiveness much closer to the issues defended today than one might think. Today's so called problematic issues regarding gender, decolonization, racism, xenophobia which underline the new definition of the museum were they inexistent in 1954 and 1988? For me all these new issues were clearly present but not defined as they are nowadays. Going back to the report of the 1954 meeting and the proceedings of the 1988 conference show many examples of participation and inclusiveness much closer to the issues defended today than one might think.
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