Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

‘Digitization’ is a logical operation that deconstructs information and transforms it into digits, rendering it a logical construct. Digital operations are fast, infinitely replicable, objective, and absolute. But digitization is not without costs: the result of operationalizing information is that it becomes abstract—disconnected from its referent, and subject to processes that alter its representation without detection. Visions of modernity that draw on the potential for digital technology to invariably raise standards of living fail to consider the intrinsic properties of the digital that tend toward replicability, speed, and scalability, which favor globalization. This article argues how, through reductive processes, the discrete, mathematical nature of the digital provides a framework for rationality and order that is fundamentally incompatible with multiple modernities. Moreover, the history of digital machines is intricately linked to education and epistemology across North America and South Africa. The mechanization of learning illustrates the promise, power, and potential consequence of digital operations; by limiting our horizons, the Modern and now the Digital, limits our ability to think, thereby concealing the destruction of society, nature, and us as a species.

This article examines the history of Kharaghoda, an important site of colonial salt extraction located on the edge of the Little Rann of Kutch, Gujarat. It highlights relationships between development and ecology through analysis of colonial documents published between 1872 and 1940. The intention at Kharaghoda was to enforce colonial political agendas through the construction of infrastructure on what was seen as an empty site. However, contrary to a tabula rasa condition, records suggest a complex relationship with site ecologies. In particular, nature was not uniformly sublimated by the project, but exerted influence on a rapidly fluctuating built environment. The article presents developments thematically, with each investigating the archives and corresponding developments chronologically. By foregrounding the ecological voice within the archives it advocates for a definition of modern heritage that recognizes interactions between nature and built environments to suggest future possibilities for conservation acknowledging human and nonhuman agencies.

How do museum professionals know that the institutions they serve are valued by the public? And who are the public or publics being served? Why should museums be trusted? It can be argued that one of the most important elements of professional knowledge is an understanding of the publics we serve and what the people who constitute these publics value in, and about museums. Despite its importance, the question has been little studied. This paper uses two national public opinion surveys conducted in Canada nearly 50 years apart to document changing perceptions of museums in Canada over the last half century and places their findings in the context of comparative studies in the United States, Europe, and Britain. The paper also looks at the curious tension between what museum professionals think about museums and what the public says about them, and how this can shape museum theory and practice.

Modern heritage encompasses not only the physical structures but also the narratives, ideas, and sociohistorical dynamics associated with them. This study explores the multifaceted aspects of modern heritage in Turkey, focusing on early republic housing projects built between 1930 and 1939. Tracing the signs of being “modern” in residential architecture, this research proposes that Kemalist reforms affecting social life served as tools to alter appearances, and behind that image, the persistence of the cultural and social life was hidden. Analyzing projects in Arkitekt journal, it identifies traditional living patterns in so-called modern houses, emphasizing the impossibility of copying-and-pasting modernity. In Turkey, modernity was neither unequivocally endorsed nor rejected; instead, it intertwined with existing social structures, creating a unique entity. Thus, it concludes that the value of early republic Turkish modern residentials lies not in formal similarities to European forms of modernism but in a transcultural understanding that embraces diverse expressions of modernity.

Following economic crises, the evolution of industrial districts (IDs) has frequently caused the crisis within entire urban systems. Being IDs based on individual will and competences, rather than on big industries, their failure can compromise the city's identity. The Italian manufacturing industry consistently relied on this process, and this paper analyzes the case study of Prato, a medieval core city in central Italy that, since the mid-twentieth century, developed a world-class textile district based on a polycentric production structure and widespread family entrepreneurialism. During the global economic crisis of the early 2000s, production almost stalled, leaving the city without the core of a collective identity, but with a legacy of empty spaces. Significant foreign migration, in particular from China, filled these spaces, consolidating the clothing sector. The study investigated the city's contemporary identities resulting from the rapid change in people, activities, and spaces.

This study, inspired by postcolonial and post-structural theories, attempts to highlight the difficulty of conducting architectural research in early modern Jerusalem, a setting in which there are gaps in the historical record. One particular gap—the practice of local architects—is portrayed through two characterizations: Orphans—existing buildings that are historiographically detached from their genealogy—and Ghosts—individuals assumed to have practiced architecture, yet their existence appears only in traces. The study wishes to explore why local architects disappeared from the historiography of early modern Jerusalem. The methodologies include a narration of the fragments that were found during a literature review, archival research, site visits, interviews, and correspondence with scholars and archivists. The study suggests that local architects were overlooked because of orientalist perceptions, disappearance of evidence, and inaccessibility or illegibility of documents. Therefore, it recommends institutional collaborations and methods, which will acknowledge the historian's subjectivity in future research.

“Tropicality” has historically been used as an epistemological tool by colonial settlers and thereafter local rulers to naturalize and espouse Western rationality and modernity. Singapore is no exception to this lingering Western framing, which continues to define state narratives of success and heritage. “Tropicality” as a hegemonic force manifests in infrastructures of large physical networks, institutionalized knowledges, and media representations. This paper dissects three chronological dominant modes of “tropicality”—the colonial, the nation-building, and the contemporary neoliberal mode—alongside their corresponding subaltern lived worlds that speak of an alternative “tropicality” often unnoticed (Figure 1). These diametric strands are studied through hegemonic infrastructure and everyday acts that resist, appropriate, or hybridize these power-laden spaces. A heterogenous methodology was adopted, capturing the epistemologies and metis employed in dominant and alternative tropicalities, respectively. Maps, charts, and archives are used to study the former; ethnographic observation, family memory, and affective experiences elucidate the latter. In this paper, I focus on the nation-building mode of “tropicality”, which shaped Singapore's rapid urbanization in the 1960s. Modernist public housing schemes borrowed from the Tropical Architecture movement are situated within a larger infrastructural field that de-skilled, cleansed, and civilized an “unruly” population, conflating natural and social order. However, these attempts at creating modern subjects were thwarted by everyday resistance performed at a critical mass, in which displaced populations tapped upon past metis, habitus, and ecological aesthetics to appropriate alienating modern infrastructure. Through these ad hoc infrastructural reconfigurations, a hybrid modern “tropicality” was negotiated. It is through deprivileging infrastructures of “tropicality” and drawing out alternative “infra-structures” of multiple, lived tropical worlds that we may move toward post-tropicality—a mentality built on an expanded understanding of how our modern environment is and has been shaped equally by dominant, neocolonial forces and also forsaken memories, practices, and everyday acts of resistance, which hold the key to alternative futures beyond the limited scope delineated by our inherited “tropical modernity”.

This paper explores the challenges and potential of engaging with public history where the histories of various “publics” are either contested or overlooked, arguing for the benefits to individuals and communities of engaging collaboratively with the past and finding new ways to tell their stories.

This review focuses on one of the most anticipated programs that He Art Museum (HEM) has produced so far, Beyond: Tadao Ando and Art. This is in part because the subject of the exhibition was the architect who designed HEM but, more interestingly, the exhibition focused on the influence of contemporary art on Ando's architectural works, rather than generally introducing architectural projects. Focusing on this perspective, this review explores the challenges and opportunities for exhibitions about well-known architects, particularly in cases of architects such as Ando, whose distinctive architectural style (allowing people clear opinions of the architect) means it is never easy for curators to develop their own narrative. In this exhibition, connecting Ando with other artists who influenced him became an opportunity to address the challenge while dealing with his architectural languages, including light through traditional media, remained a concern. It has also been found that further work is needed to reveal the relationship between each artist and Ando, which was technically well designed in the space but was not delivering each artist's influence on Ando effectively.

The N'zima village in Grand-Bassam and the Abbashawel area in Asmara were intrinsically connected to the “modern” colonial capitals of present-day Côte d'Ivoire and Eritrea, respectively, on the verges of which they functioned. However, structurally, organizationally and ontologically, they differed profoundly from their French- and Italian-planned “neighbors,” together with which they are today inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Interpreted as antithetical counterparts, products of African encounters with modernity, the two urban entities within Grand-Bassam and Asmara—European and African—tend to be described as interdependent, representing two sides of the same coin, neither of which could have existed without the other. This paper interrogates the said interpretation based on the center-periphery dynamic created by the politics of modernity, and proposes to use instead the decolonial pluriversal perspective and the concept of transmodernity to understand the experiences of being of the colonized African populations of Grand-Bassam and Asmara outside of Western onto-epistemologies. It points to the N'zima village and Abbashawel as the areas that enable visualizing reality that contests the binaries created by Western modernity in seeking pluralistic politics.