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.”

How does living in a “declining democracy” feel?

Claudia Roth, German Minister of State for Culture, at Belinale.
Photo: Andreas Rentz | Geety Images (taken from The Guardian)

I was in an international group discussion a few days ago, where the subject was museums and declining democracies. We heard about the woes of Polish museum directors, widely reported in the international press (examples from 2017 onwards: here, here, here, here, here); we heard about museums in Hungary, expected to “interpret for the people the wills of the government” or getting censored because of a participatory art project depicting the President or, more recently, seeing a director getting sacked for ignoring the law against the “promotion of homosexuality”, which he had voted for when he was a member of parliament. We also heard about the Netherlands, where the extreme right has been attacking museum narratives for some time and is now trying to form a government, after winning the elections in November.

Culture prescribed

Les Kurbas Theatre, Lviv, Ukraine, 2022. Photo: Adriano Miranda

Attending performances of ancient Greek plays in ancient Greek theatres is an experience that always gets me thinking. I find particularly moving the stream of people heading towards the theatre to watch for the umpteenth time the same stories that tell us of love, hate, respect, arrogance, thirst for power, war, justice, revenge. Stories written many centuries ago about human nature and all that is good and bad about it. And then, once I look around me at all the people filling up the theatre, and also seeing them leave after the performance, I often wonder “So what? What now?”. To what extent people use the “food for thought” provided by the play to think about contemporary life, about themselves and others, their place in the world and what could be their contribution towards a better world? When I consider contemporary Greek society (and other societies), the way we take care (or don’t take care) of each other, I am reminded that the power does not lie in the play alone, but also, and perhaps even more, in the individual and what that person will (or will not) do with what was given to them.