Session 03- Museums, community and local heritage

"In the third webinar, two very diverse yet complementary presentations took place. On one side, the Babel Tower hosted Mike Robinson, Full Professor of Cultural Heritage at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage, the Europe’s largest independent museum. He gave a provocative presentation titled “Breaking out the museum: Radically rethinking value”. Through an overview of very diverse contexts around the world, Robinson showed how museums change depending on what societies value. He argued that sometimes it takes time for an object to become appreciated. For example, at Ironbridge, today there is a sense of pride on being the birthplace of the industrial revolution and the first mass production of iron, but of course 300 years ago it was different, and now people are pride to be the custodians of a sort of a “national slag collection”. He concluded with a reflection: the necessity of a recalibration of how societies actually engage and use museums, particularly in the face of very rapid social and cultural change and economic pressures. The question he left with is: how these changes affect what societies actually value in the world? How to create not just physical space, but also intellectual areas of reflections for the new things that societies value?
Then, the same day, the Babel Tower hosted Orla Breslin for a second round of reflections about ecomuseums. Specifically, Breslin shared her experience as Local Operations Coordinator for the LIVE Project aimed at the creation of Ireland’s first Ecomuseum in rural South Kerry. She gave some details on the genesis and the characteristics of this process that started five years ago and it is aimed at fostering long term environmental and educational tourism. The core of the approach is the co-production of knowledge and projects. The challenges of co-production emerged, especially in times of social distancing." Giusy Pappalardo