This link takes you to the page on the event European National Museums: Making Communities and Negotiating Conflicts 25th January 2012, including a the panel on the creation of new history museums and discussions on the first policy brief from EuNaMus.
EuNaMus international conference:
National museums and the negotiation of difficult pasts /
Les musées nationaux et la négociation des passés
difficilies
Brussels, 26-27 January 2012
Maison des Arts, Campus of the Université Libre de
Bruxelles
56 avenue Jeanne, Campus du Solbosch, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Bruxelles.
Organised by:
Dominique Poulot, Eunamus / Université Paris 1 / Institut Universitaire de France
Felicity Bodenstein, Eunamus
José M. Lanzarote-Guiral, Eunamus
Contact: eunamus3@gmail.com
Click here for Programme in PDF
PROGRAM
Thursday January 26th morning session: 9:00 – 12:30
Session 1: From artworks to human remains: restitution of cultural assets
9:00 / Christophe Loir (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Dominique Poulot
Introduction to the conference
9:30 / Keynote speaker: Fredrik Svanberg (Historiska Museet, Stockholm)
Bodies collected and contested: the heritage of anatomical museums
10:00 / Lill Eilertsen (Eunamus, Oslo)
Breaking the ice: Contested objects in the Arctic areas
10:20 / Eva Silvén (Nordiska Museet, Stockholm)
Contested Sami heritage: drums and sieidis on the move
11:20 / Lotten Gustafsson Reinius (Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm)
Beyond the ritualized closure: re-locating perspectives on a celebrated Swedish-Australian restitution case
11:40 / Andrzej Jakubowski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
The Effects of State Succession on National Museums: the Negotiation of Difficult Pasts in the Post-Cold War Context
Thursday January 26th: afternoon session 14:00 – 18:00
Session 2: Negotiating difficult pasts: traumatic memories of war and dictatorship
14:00 / Keynote speaker: Robin Ostow (Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, and University of Toronto)
Warsaw’s new Jewish Museum: Building a new history an a twenty-first century democracy
14:30 / Sheila Watson, Andy Sawyer (Eunamus, Leicester)
Museums and World War II
14:50 / Silke Walther (Ruhr Universität, Bochum)
Imagined Communities in Contemporary Holocaust Exhibitions
15:50 / Paul Williams (Ralph Appelbaum Associates, New York)
Treading Difficult Ground: The Effort to Establish Russia’s First National Gulag Museum
16:10 / Mathilde Le Luyer (University of Lille 2)
Repenser une mémoire européenne du totalitarisme, l’expérience des musées de l’occupation baltes.
16:50 / Simina Badica (Eunamus, CEU)
Museums of Oblivion. Exhibiting Communism in Post-Communist Romania
17:10 / Rossitza Guentcheva (Eunamus, CEU)
Communism Contested: The Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia
Friday January 27th morning session: 9:00 – 12:30
Session 3: Negotiating difficult pasts: shifting borders and community identities
9:00 / Keynote speaker: Tassos Anastassiadis (McGill University, Montreal)
From Ottoman refugees to EU citizens and global diasporas: Shifting boundaries of imagined communities and the glocal usages of the past
9:30 / Ilaria Porciani (Eunamus, Bologna)
A Tale of Three Museums. The Parenzo and Pola Museums in Istria and the Fiume museum in Rome: hot spots for national identities
09:50 / Simona Troilo (Eunamus, Bologna)
The fabrication of Rhodes heritage. The Italian colonial politics and the question of antiquities in the Dodecanese (1914-1928)
10:50 / Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert (Cyprus University of Technology) and Alexandra Bounia (Eunamus Aegean)
“Reluctant Museums”: between a church and a museum. Displaying religion in Cypriot museums
11:10 / Luís Raposo(National Museum of Archaeology, Lisbon).
Portuguese ancestry and contemporary disillusions: the role of the National Ethnographic Museum / National Museum of Archaeology, from late XIX century to present days
11:30 / Nabila Oulebsir (Université de Poitiers)
Non-European Museums in the Time of Globalisation: Negotiating French
History, Investing National Identity in the Twenty-First Century Algeria
From the call:
Objects of contested possession
How have European discourses of ownership developed in national museums over the last century in relation to the possession of artefacts that are subject to restitution claims? Cases of contested objects in Europe can be related to contexts of colonial appropriations of material culture and post-colonial claims, to processes of secularisation of church property, to situations of war and plunder, to archaeological finds in territories where national frontiers have changed or are disputed. From a methodological point of view case studies will be privileged that go beyond legal aspects to examine the historical significance of using objects from the past as expressions of national identity.
Difficult pasts
What role do national museums play in handling historical issues that are socially and politically sensitive and liable to give rise to contestation? Particular attention will be given to individual or comparative cases related to the construction of national territories and to conflicting representations of “natural” and ethnic communities, which have become the subject of specific revisions in light of political and intellectual developments.
Furthermore, national museums are increasingly being called upon to provide forums for dealing with highly sensitive issues of traumatic past events – particularly those related to situations of political criminality. In light of the increasing importance of memory studies, this conference will examine how museums attempt to represent the “unspeakable” elements of the past.
