We must offer open spaces for discussion

Museums are places that showcase not only what remains of the past, but also what we choose to see of it. They combine memory, identity and cultural continuity of the past and the present in a knot that we must be able to – if not untie – then certainly understand, manage and, above all, explain in its unresolved aspects.

Museums are not neutral places. They choose what to exhibit, which stories should be preserved and how these should be communicated to the public. They have an enormous power to filter objects and information, and to construct different images of the past, depending on the choices made. 

This power brings with it ethical issues for museums to deal with, and there are several ways to address these. One source is the International Council of Museum’s code of ethics, which invites museums to collaborate with the communities of origin of their collections and to actively promote the full and completely transparent sharing of information about the conserved heritage. It is from this dialogue between the two parties that a shared solution can emerge.

At the Museo Egizio, we strongly believe it is necessary to tackle these issues. We are trying to understand how the museum of the future must make a careful examination of everything that it has accumulated, and how the various levels of interpretation have been formed. This will slowly lead, for example, to overcoming the concept of identity as an innate characteristic, highlighting instead how it is the result of a process of progressive codification of modes of behaviour of a social group that recognises itself as such. This process can take place at various scales – it can apply to small groups, entire countries or continents, or even larger entities, such as the global north and global south. 

Museum collections can play an important role in the lives of refugees and immigrants. They can be a way for them to reconnect with their roots, observing how their country of origin somehow got there before them. Or collections can serve as a starting point to begin a process of deepening their knowledge of the community in which they have settled. 

They can enable refugees to understand the connections with past forms of life and serve as a fundamental interpretive key to certain structures and traditions, whose origins and development can then be understood. Creating specific programmes that aim to develop an exchange of cultural experiences capable of promoting mutual understanding is a vital part of helping immigrant communities to engage with culture.

The experience that the Museo Egizio has accumulated over the years in this field represents a basis on which to continue building. We have done so in multiple ways and this has involved a highly diversified public – including academics, local communities and the municipality – with projects such as Museo Egizio A/R, Io Sono Benvenuto (“I am welcome”) and Tante Voci al Museo (“Many Voices at Museum”). We have also held contemporary art exhibitions where Egyptian and western Asiatic artists such as Sara Sallam and Ali Cherri have been called to establish a dialogue with our collection, while also highlighting issues related to the colonial past and the overall display interpretation and conservation of the collection.

There is no clear recipe for the future, but we must certainly keep in mind that much still needs to be done to properly address the challenges we face. The Museo Egizio and museums in general should make more effort to become open spaces for discussion – spaces that place people’s culture at the centre and seek to relate the lives of those who have been to those of today’s visitors. They should be places in which to fully understand the potential and limits of knowledge, and which remind us that time, in Plato’s words, is the moving image of eternity.

Christian Greco is the director of the Museo Egizio in Turin