carine ayélé durand

The Ethnography Museum of Geneva intends to establish collaborative relationships with various Indigenous Peoples and local communities by recognizing the international right of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) and the laws, traditions and customs of Indigenous Peoples regarding their rights to their “cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property” and cultural heritage as affirmed in Articles 11, 12 and 31 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is in this context that several Indigenous artists, experts on Indigenous Peoples’ rights and researchers have been invited to contribute to the concept of the exhibition since it was officially launched in June 2019.

The concept team worked with four Indigenous experts who were asked to examine the development of the exhibition in its initial, intermediate and final stages and to implement a new framework for respectful, rights based engagement. Their suggestions and recommendations made it possible to reorient the project at key moments in its evolution. Artists’ contributions have been many and varied. Some works were created specifically for this exhibition while other pre-existing works, bearing witness to Indigenous Peoples’ resistance and commitment in the face of the climate and environmental emergency, were added at a later stage as they interfaced perfectly with our project. Ten video portraits have given an additional perspective to the way in which Indigenous Peoples are organizing themselves today, on every continent, in order to protect their lands and territories and hand down their knowledge and ways of knowing to younger generations. The recognition and affirmation of the internationally recognized right of Free, Prior and Informed Consent allows us to adopt a human rights-based approach and to actively contribute to the ongoing processes of healing and revitalisation taking place within many indigenous territories.

Over the past thirty years, under the influence of New Museology, particularly in Quebec and to a lesser extent in France and Switzerland, museums have operated a division of labour between exhibition-making and collections curatorship.
New Museologists, as Viau-Courville argues "denounced museums as being too colonial, elitist and centred on collections and collecting methods, their exhibitions and research being too symbolic, too focused on the past, and, overall, too expensive considering that they had no real purpose for contemporary society (2016, p. 8).
This shift opposed "new community-driven museum projects" against traditional object-based scholarly research. In the process, objects became illustrations of exhibition narratives (Viau-Courville, 2016, p. 9) and scholar-curators an embarrassing figure of past traditions.
In this context, this paper aims to depart from the idea that collection-based research should be relegated to the past. On the contrary, it argues that museums wishing to remain relevant and addressing contemporary issues may gain new insights from incorporating object-based research as part of exhibition making.
On the other hand, drawing on the conservation work of two totem poles from Alaska held at the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva, this paper aims to redefine curatorial practice as a skilled practice which assemble together with and around things museum professionals, artists and artisans. Through this assemblage of people and collections, curators are in a unique position to reflect on the cultural continuity of indigenous peoples' traditions, on authenticity, and on indigenous ways of thinking historically.

Se presenta el resumen de los objetivos del Libro Blanco de la gestion del Patrimonio historico-arqueologico del Grupo Ciudades Patrimonio de la Humanidad de Espana. Este documento pretende ser una guia para la gestion integral del Patrimonio de las ciudades, como parte esencial de las mismas. Se parte de la vision integral de ciudad y su Patrimonio, como paisaje urbano historico, y del importante papel que juegan los ayuntamientos como administracion proxima a la ciudadania.

Objectives The main aim of this project is to understand how European colonial activity influenced environmental and cultural transformations in this region of the Indian Ocean (Seetah 2010) by targeting specific locations (Figure 2), incorporating slave, indentured and imperial sites, as well as sites with high eco-archaeological potential. Establishing base-line soil conditions formed the focus of the first season and centred on a site in the north of the island at Mon Choisy (overall size 800m²). It forms part of a former plantation and offers a ...

Relocating museum collections involves many challenges, but also provides a unique opportunity for extensive reorganisation, which further complicate the task. Common approaches to both moving and reorganising tend to be empirical, linear and coarse-grained. This limits their usefulness for planning long-term and detailed facility moves. However, issues ranging from space estimation, storage design, reorganisation and relocation all point to a unified solution. Our proposal is a custom computer tool that aims to describe, analyse and virtually manipulate an entire storage setting. With its current implementation in Excel Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), staff at the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva (MEG) planned the exact physical integration of the collection (75,000 objects) into the new storage furniture, months ahead of the move, adapting to new constraints along the way, and eventually reorganising the collection while moving it. A simple visualisation interface presents the d...

In this study of artistic practice surrounding the development of the Pasifika Styles exhibition at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Cambridge), the author argues that certain methodologies employed in artistic practice, such as techniques of assemblage, not only suggest ways in which collaborative initiatives between museums and their communities can be realized, they also offer practical direction for the development of complementary ethnographic techniques. Interest among museum practitioners in what artists can offer museums is explored in relation to their increasing need to demonstrate their social relevance.

Over the past three decades, ethnographic museums have increasingly collected and displayed contemporary artworks in order to challenge assumptions about the (in)authenticity of cultural minorities. Yet, this paper argues, by perpetuating ambiguities and contradictions in their collecting and display practices, they have often failed to fully acknowledge the complexities attached to the notion of cultural continuity. Drawing on examples from the Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge, it is suggested that the collecting of contemporary artworks in ethnographic museums might not be sufficient to make these institutions socially and politically relevant. As some of the Sámi and Māori artists involved have indicated, direct engagement between artists and museum staff, and with the public, is fundamental to conveying that their artworks are at once ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’.