The ambition of META-MUSEUM project finds an important point of reference in the scientific contribution of Professor Mairesse. For this reason, we invited the professor to give a lecture, which, by offering a fascinating historical overview on the crucial theme of mediation, introduced the work and engaged even the partners with a more technical background.
Below is a summary of the contribution through the words of René Capovin from the EMA team.
Michela Benente
Vice-coordinator
Insights from Professor François Mairesse’s keynote speech: A travel through cultural mediation
“A travel through cultural mediation”, this is the suggestive title of the speech delivered by professor Francois Mairesse for the Meta-Museum network in Turin, but also for local professionals attracted by a so reputated speaker. Their expectations have not been deceived.
The travel had as first step a crisis: in Tokyo ICOM Conference (2019) a harsh debate arose around the new definition of museum, whose quite militant accent found several oppositions. One of the criticisms focused on the total absence of the term “education”. Significantly, the next ICOM Conference (Prague 2022) approved the current definition of museum, where education is confirmed as a key-element of museums’ identity. Also the ICOM Dictionary of Museology, edited by Mairesse, focuses on several terms pertaining the educative role of museums: obviously we find “education”, but also “learning”, “interpretation”, “pedagogy” and “social inclusion”. The french term “médiation” deserves more attention: placed at the core of Mairesse’s speech, this word can not be translated with the English “mediation” – rather, “interpretation” better expresses the semantic thickness of this new concept, deepily representative of the challenges faced by contemporary museums. In fact, we can appreciate the importance of “cultural mediation” only considering its continuity with the historic educative role of museums, but also marking the quite radical change happened in the second half of the XX century, when museums have been recast as social interfaces between cultural heritage and real users, whose background, needs and voice matter.
Before framing “cultural mediation” in its recent context, Mairesse invited the public into an inspiring trip through the history of museums and museology. The first protagonist of this gallery is the famous painter Jacques-Louis David, who conceived the just born Louvre as a source of “implicit education” available for fathers teaching their kids. Around 50 years after, Henry Cole, the first director of Victoria and Albert Museum, considered education on a wider scale: museums are supposed to play a role also for workers and non-specialized public (for this reason they have to be open on Sunday: pubs must find an healthier competitor!). But at that time museums began also to be conceived as resource for students – not in the now common form of class visits, but as dedicated “museum for schools”. At the beginning of the XX Century, United States became the most innovative laboratory on the educative impact of museums: pedagogical departments appear, as well as “museum boxes” for schools, guided tours etc.
As we anticipated, the ’60s marked a turning point in this story: times were a-changin’, in Dylan words, and museums too. First of all, museum began to be conceived as a medium of communication (McLuhan, Cameron) rather than a box of things speaking for themselves. Convergently, art museums were denounced (Bourdieu) as “class institutions”, reinforcing social inequalities. Museums had to find a new role in a society whose order was exposed to a radical criticism: new museology and the work of authors like Kenneth Hudson expressed the search of a new legitimation of museums as institutions fitted for contemporary society. Obviously, if “society does not exist”, as Margaret Thatcher declared in the ’80s, or if the priority for a museum becomes enlarging the urban touristic offer (1, 10, 100 Guggenheim Bilbao), new museology is out.
Against commodification and customization, the concept of “cultural mediation”, appeared in the ’90s, seems a way to give a new answer to the same problems emerged (but not solved) in the ’60s and ’70s: in other terms, the limits of museums continue to be perceive as a gap between (potential) cultural offer and (real) social demand – a gap that museums are engaged to reduce. We could say that the cultural mediator operates between museum and public as a sort of double guide: museums discovered to need an help in order to reach people (and not only the happy few), while people need an help to understand what museums can do for them, citizens of a post-modern society. In 2002 a law set that each French museum must include a mediation department, devoted to go beyond education and guided tours. In those years, the birth of the movement “MuseoMix” confirmed the urgence of strategies opening the resources of museums to real people. Mairesse underlined that the axis museum-people is not necessarily filled of informations: in fact, the link can be also emotional, and that can be another road to understanding. Cultural mediation can be “informative” or “emotional”, and the same is true about the opposition “relation to the self-relation to the other”: an action of cultural mediation can have a “social” or “intimate” structure. Cultural mediation is flexible, but unavoidably partial: one has to chose which is the priority to be chosen for each act of mediation.
The last insight offered by Mairesse pertained the meaning of current social and political issues (climate justice, decolonization etc.), often at the center of cultural mediation, in particular in anglo-saxon museums. These issues were also the political fuel of the new definition of museum, debated in Tokyo 2019. Mairesse proposed to read these phenomena as moment of a recurring “social cycle”, in which the world of museums reacts to cyclical economical crisis in order to find a new social legitimation. From this perspective, talking of climate change at museum is the current way to say that museums deserve to survive, despite austerity.
What is sure is that a speech like the one delivered from Mairesse is the best way to wish long life to museums.
René Capovin
