Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

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.

Museum educators' (MEs) visions and desires for career development represent an idealized and aspirational identity of being better museum educational professionals. As part of a larger project that explored museum educators' self-concept as education professionals in China, this preliminary study explored 23 Chinese science museum educators' thoughts and ideas about their imagined professional identity in terms of describing personal desires for professional development pathways. Informed by a Possible Selves theoretical perspective, museum educators in this study elucidated five hoped-for professional development approaches, including cross-departmental communication, external communication, formal training in an engaging approach, peer support, and self-regulated learning. Their expectations for professional growth, to a large extent, were derived from personal reflection and social comparison on the basis of their past work experiences in museum institutions. Therefore, their imagination about future professional development was deeply influenced by the complicated sociocultural and political contexts in which they lived and worked. As the professionalization of science museum educator work in China is at a relatively early stage of emergence, this study provides insights that may help scaffold and direct professionalization efforts of museum education practices in China, and other countries and regions with similar contextual situations.

Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene draws from a critical selection of the 54 papers presented at the second International MoHoA conference Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene, (October 26–28, 2022), hosted by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, in partnership with the University of Liverpool's School of Architecture. The conference expanded MoHoA's aim of encouraging equitable approaches to modern heritage as an urgent and essential response to an age of planetary crises whose roots are entangled with centuries-old culture of extraction, exploitation, and domination. Building on the lessons learned from the first MoHoA conference, Modern Heritage of Africa (2021), hosted by the University of Cape Town and the subject of an earlier special edition of Curator (65/July 3, 2022), this second conference emphasized the interconnection between these cultures and the dawn of the Anthropocene. Participants were asked to reflect on reconceptualized formulations of modern heritage and its entangled relationship with the planetary crises experienced, albeit unevenly and unequally, by all living and nonliving things. This paper assembles and reflects on the contributions of 18 peer-reviewed papers that collectively demonstrate the range and depth of topics presented. In the spirit of equity, diversity, and inclusivity and in line with MoHoA's decentering, decolonizing, and reframing agenda, these have also been chosen to reflect the different contributors' experiences, from senior academics to young and early career professionals.

Exhibitions have become a major highlight of information communication and innovative services in Chinese libraries, archives, and local chronicles museums in recent years. However, many of these exhibitions have been hindered in “dialogue” with their audiences, leading to a limited impact. Hence, this study employed a triangulation approach, combining literature analysis and empirical study, to identify the existing problems of libraries, archives, and local chronicles exhibitions. On the one hand, perspectives were refined from previous studies through literature analysis to establish a research foundation for exhibition issues. On the other hand, nine institutions were selected for empirical study through importance-performance analysis (IPA) in east, central, and west China, integrating audience perspectives into problematic space. Based on the triangulation evidence, the problems mainly focus on three aspects: architectural planning, exhibition business, and public services, whereas the causes of the problems include stereotypes, late start points, and so on. The root causes appear to lie in the failure to transform from the document center to the public center, and the imbalance of curatorial theory research as a constraint bottleneck. These findings are expected to be utilized to enhance the specialization of Chinese documentary exhibitions, which attempt to overcome the difficulties of audience understanding and realize the real value of documents and the communication function of the media, thus promoting an effective dialogue between exhibitions and audiences.

This research aims to explore early concrete bridges in China, especially those from 1950s to 1970s, as a form of modern heritage. It asserts that there are inherent contradictions in how these bridges were perceived over half a century later. Although this may affect their listing as cultural heritage, it also makes them a representative case for a decentered approach to modern heritage not only at an international level, but also within a particular national context. In a country still building concrete bridges of ever-increasing scales, early concrete bridges in China, despite their age, are seldom considered as cultural heritage. However, while historically and technologically these bridges were close to the everyday lived experiences, they are often more difficult to research than older, pre-1949 buildings and structures. This is not only because of the lack of readily available archives, but also that these bridges, especially the iconic “double-curved” bridges, which were politicized during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), represented an important period in modern Chinese history that is still politically sensitive and contested, possessing cultural values that mean vastly different things for different people. This is illustrated by the case study of three bridges in Nanjing: the Yangtze River Bridge of Nanjing, arguably the most famous Chinese bridge in the twentieth century; the Little Egret Bridge (Bailu Bridge), an early double-curved bridge, which is said to be a prototype of the former; and the Xiaolingwei Experimental Bridge, an important landmark in the development of the double-curved bridge but entirely forgotten after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Accounts from before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution provide very different narratives about the process of their design and construction. Their different geographical locations and different associations with this turbulent and contested period of modern Chinese history also affects their conservation status today. All these factors combined make these bridges an exemplar of dissonant modern heritage that, although situated in a Chinese context, has important lessons globally for our understanding of the impact and legacies of modernity.