To honestly care

Photo: Maria Vlachou

When I attended the Balkan Museum Network conference last month, I had the pleasure of listening to Łukasz Bratasz, Head of the Cultural Heritage Research group at the Jerzy Haber Institute (Poland). His keynote speech was about “Sustainability-conscious management of art collections”. For someone like me, who knows the absolutely basic on environmental control in museums, it was a surprising and refreshing talk. Perhaps also for those who know more than I do. Because Łukasz shared with us the results of studies that show that objects are much less vulnerable to environmental variations than previously assumed and that there are other ways of managing art collections, with a significantly lighter carbon footprint.

Never again: how do you live up to a lofty mission like this?

Image taken from Vatican News (Photo: Agence France Presse)

Back in a 2014, in a post called “In circles”, I wrote that “Apparently, we don´t value human life equally, so all European countries in the United Nations Human Rights Council may abstain (all of them!) from the vote to open an enquiry regarding alleged violations of human rights in Gaza; apparently, some ‘never again’ situations are justified, so our governments may continue supporting and selling arms to the Israeli government; apparently, each case is a case and everything depends, so there are some ‘never again’ cases where we, common citizens, may reserve the right to be more ‘balanced’ or neutral.”