Empty Museums

by the Editorial Board

Ana Maria Theresa P. Labrador is a social anthropologist and Honorary Senior Fellow of the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Andrea Witcomb is Professor and Associate Dean of Research at the Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Australia.

Bruno Brulon Soares is Professor of Museology at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Brazil.

Charalampos (Harris) Chaitas is Executive Director for Culture, Arts, and Education at Qiddiya Investment Company, Saudi Arabia.

Hervé François is Director of the Historial de la Grande Guerre (Historial of the Great War), France.

Jane Legget is Associate Director (Cultural Heritage) at the New Zealand Tourism Research Institute, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand.

Mathieu Viau-Courville is Director at the Office de coopération et d’information muséales (Ocim), France.

Morongwa Mosothwane is Archaeologist and Lecturer in Forensic Archaeology, University of Botswana.

Though largely disregarded when it was first reported by Dr Li Wenliang in Wuhan, China in December 2019 (Petersen et al. 2020), what was initially believed to be a localised cluster of pneumonia cases quickly revealed itself as a highly communicable novel virus. On 7 January 2020, Chinese authorities reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) the existence of a new respiratory disease—2019-nCoV, or Covid-19—which soon spread to Thailand (13 January 2020), Japan (15 January), South Korea (20 January) and the US (20 January) (CDC 2020; WHO 2020a).

By 30 January of the same year, nearly 10,000 cases had been reported in 21 countries (Holshue et al. 2020, p. 929), and on 10 February, Covid-19 related deaths in China surpassed those from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003. On 14 February, the first Covid-19 death in Europe was reported in Paris before cases spiked in Northern Italy, prompting lockdowns in more than 10 cities across the regions of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna. The Italian government announced a full national lockdown on 8 March. Three days later, on 11 March, 18,000 cases and 4,921 deaths had been reported in 114 countries. In response, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, characterised the global outbreak as a pandemic (WHO 2020b). Soon after, on 15 March, Spain reported the second-highest death rate after Italy. This was followed by many Western European countries enforcing strict lockdowns.

By the end of March, countries across Latin America were reporting Covid-19 infections and exponentially increasing death tolls, as was Iran whose death toll rose to more than 1,800; several African countries registered rising cases and deaths as well. One by one, countries around the world imposed lockdowns in an attempt to curtail accelerated infection rates. By mid-April 2020, worldwide cases were approaching two million, with some 125,000 deaths: a number which as of February 2022 has risen to nearly six million, despite promising global vaccination efforts.

Covid-19 has since brought on large-scale social and economic shocks around the world, leading to major shifts in labour markets, healthcare environments, education systems, political structures and governance. Moreover, severe and repeated lockdowns and unprecedented travel bans affecting over 90 per cent of the world population throughout 2020 also occasioned major disruptions in core businesses and local economies, causing worldwide recession and employment precarity. Amid a global pandemic that continues to unfold as of 2022, the world now also faces growing geopolitical uncertainty underpinned by rises in deglobalisation and populism movements, alongside conspiracy theories fuelled by misinformation campaigns. In the aftermath of rapidly spreading infection rates, different nations’ responses to the pandemic also significantly impacted their capacity to effectively manage their health systems and economic recoveries. While countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Singapore have prioritised public health through strong quarantine and testing regimes, other nations opted instead to prioritise the economy over the shutdowns favoured by public health experts, a path which ultimately weakened public understandings of the crisis (Béland et al. 2021). This has led to a crisis during which public health policies, political tensions and conflicting messages to the public have been inexorably intertwined.

Museums in crisis

While museums are no strangers to crises, the unexpected reverberations of Covid-19 have united institutions across the world in their struggle for survival and relevance in a deeply troubled world. Many museums have been left without their visitors, volunteers, freelancers, projected funding— they have effectively become empty museums. This issue of Museum International examines the unprecedented pandemic crisis and shows the ways in which museums have found opportunity therein, reaffirming the promotion of museum work as a resilient tool to support communities and as a catalyst for effective recovery. Empty Museums brings together 15 contributions whose authors examine some of the innovations in community practices, organisational philosophies, curatorial policies and new uses of technology that museums have undertaken since the pandemic.

A first group of articles by Mackay, Jurčišinová et al., Yang and Min, Simón Diez, and Dal Santo et al. analyse national and regional responses to the crisis. With the cultural and creative sectors (CCS) having been among those most affected worldwide (OECD 2021), many national and local governments introduced measures to support CCS workforces. However, and despite best efforts, these have not always been adequately adapted or accessible to the majority of museums and their staff, especially non-traditional workers such as intermittent, freelance, or hybrid staff members—i.e. those combining salaried part-time work with freelance work (OECD 2021, pp. 2-3). This situation has exposed the fragility of the cultural sector and its lack of preparedness in the face of crises. Through their respective studies based on qualitative interviews with museum professionals in the UK and the Netherlands, articles from Rachel Mackay and Kaja Jurčišinová et al. both underscore the necessity to rethink museums’ traditional organisational constructs, in turn developing new staffing models and more sustainable programming. Mackay’s research reveals the significant impact of the crisis on the mental health and well-being of museum staff in the UK, and the resilience of some museums’ responses in leading the way towards effectively promoting staff skill development—facilitating adaptability and offsetting emotional impacts during critical times. As part of their study, Jurčišinová et al. held online interviews with several Dutch museum representatives during the crisis to assess the survival of the blockbuster exhibition in a post-Covid world. Despite government programmes offering generous financial support, the authors reveal a foreseeable polarisation of the ‘blockbuster’ model, which may likely be carried on in major art museums, but less so in small to mid-size institutions which increasingly turn to the online domain to reach younger, more diverse audiences and community-driven projects.

In a pandemic-hit world, the phenomenon of museums ‘going digital’ is further confirmed by Jin Yang and Liang Min’s research into the livestreaming activities designed by China-based museums during lockdowns. Identifying such digital strategies as a new way forward for museums to continue engaging audiences while the former are closed, the authors analyse the benefits and challenges of museums turning to major online livestreaming platforms and subscription-based online events in parallel to the onsite museum experience. Yang and Min’s study is followed by Ainhoa Simόn Diez’s contribution, which explores the myriad ways museums can transform passive online followers into actively engaged participants. Based on a quantitative study of social media users by Spanish museums, the author argues for the benefits of diversifying museums’ online presence through different strategies, notably through cobranding—partnering with influencers or aligning museum actions with events or dates of global significance—which has shown to be beneficial for some museums.

While digital activity—formerly perceived as an optional add-on—seems to be moving into the mainstream, and while this can be perceived as a victory for the accessibility of collections, it is worth noting that not all institutions are equipped to make such a transition towards digital content, nor do all citizens have equal access to museums’ quickly-evolving online activities. In fact, in many places around the world, Covid-19 has further exacerbated social inequalities and deep divides in social structures, especially in terms of class, race and gender. The Brazil-Italy cooperation charter, ‘Distant but United. The Ecomuseums and Community Museums of Italy and Brazil’, as presented in this issue by Raul Dal Santo et al., signals the commitment of museum and heritage professionals in these two countries to develop socially responsive and ethically driven guidelines for museum practices that are aimed at empowering communities during crisis. The charter unites ecomuseums and community museums in both countries through the implementation of targeted skills development, chiefly to improve digital access to and uses of heritage by local communities.

The second group of articles by Frost, Hoffmann et al., Azócar and Hauyon, Lobo Guerrero Arenas and Zuluaga Medina, Pestana and Alissa, and Pluszyńska, presents case studies illustrating how museums in the UK, Germany, Chile, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, and Poland, respectively mobilised their resources and expertise to quickly adapt as the pandemic crisis unfolded, with most having turned, perhaps inevitably, to digital activities before planning their reopening.

Reporting from the British Museum, Stuart Frost recounts how a massive furlough of temporary staff inevitably led the museum to turn to digital content and platforms to retain audiences, both through online visits and talks. Yet it was the global protests and solidarity that emerged through the Black Lives Matter movement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death that triggered the British Museum to realign its programming and contents as part of its reopening strategy, in efforts to address its own colonial past.

Hoffmann et al. share their experiences as young professionals who completed their traineeship— Volontariat—as part of the Museums of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. The authors were part of a co-curated exhibition project whose unveiling faced a number of uncertainties and challenges during the pandemic. The paper outlines the group’s agile and flexible management and planning approach, whose efficiency and creativity allowed them to complete their project within a large and complex organisational structure.

Leslie Azócar and Oscar Hauyon examine the efforts undertaken by the Museo Gabriela Mistral in Vicuña, Chile, to develop digital programming, despite the lack of technical and financial means to do so. The museum team designed a series of online creative challenges that progressively allowed community members to effectively become remote museum co-curators; by emailing the museum videos of themselves reciting poems or themed poetry collages inspired by the works of Gabriela Mistral, Latin America’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Their creations were then shared and promoted on the museum’s social media platforms. To these engagement activities were added online lectures, happenings and virtual museum visits. The authors reflect on lessons learned and the new visitor engagement opportunities and challenges these activities have brought to their institution.

Jimena Lobo Guerrero Arenas and María Fernanda Zuluaga Medina present the restructuring plan for the University of Caldas’s Museums Centre. The Colombian institution devised a new vision for its curatorial strategy in a post-pandemic world, which resulted from a complex internal consultation process based on a participatory, open and reciprocal dialogue. The result is a case study on organisational change/memory that provides a rare view into the internal and often complex institutional processes behind museum work. The authors argue for a ‘contextual museology’ that draws on institutional memory to strengthen its capacity to face challenging times.

Candida Pestana and Lama Alissa’s presentation of the recently inaugurated King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, in Ithra, Saudi Arabia, focuses on the strategies deployed to maintain audience engagement during lockdown. By setting the goal to play an active role in the Saudi response to the pandemic, the authors show how the Center actually grew its audience base during the crisis through different strategies and uses of digital communication channels and community engagement.

Anna Pluszyńska next addresses the matter of copyright and open access policies in museums through her study of the Polish History Museum. She argues that museums embracing the digital turn should also consider establishing clear copyright management practices and institutional policies when handling digital heritage resources. Such efforts ultimately align with museums’ educational goals, ensuring that online content can be offered to broad audiences free of technical, economic and legal barriers.

Last but not least, a third group of articles by Bernardi, Debono, and Landau-Donnelly and Sethi, open up broader theoretical and philosophical considerations in the process of making sense of the impact of Covid-19. Massimo Bernardi invites the museum community the take on the Anthropocene as a useful concept for climate change adaptation, and to solidify museums’ commitment to shaping new and more sustainable visions for a post-Anthropocene world. Namely, the author argues that museums should build new narratives about the Anthropocene that concurrently build on international policies on sustainable development, new approaches and philosophies on contemporaneity, and changing relationships between science and society.

Sandro Debono then explores the changing dialectics between the physical and the digital realms of museum work—the ‘phygital’. As the growth of digitalisation has been accelerated by the pandemic, so has the necessity to manage its impact and possible future scenarios effectively. By bringing together literature from fields beyond museums and heritage, Debono offers a comprehensive analysis of how digital technologies and behaviours affect the ways cultural heritage organisations today need to adapt their digital competences, and overall philosophies, to rapidly changing digital cultures.

Friederike Landau-Donnelly and Avni Sethi take the Conflictorium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, as a starting point to explore ontological considerations of emptiness and absence as counterhegemonic tools for museums. The authors here consider a broad definition of what a museum is— or rather what it should do—to reveal how empty spaces in exhibition design can serve the larger purpose of what they argue as a generative tool that assists in circumventing oppression and silencing. In her concluding remarks to Empty Museums, Ana Maria Theresa Labrador draws on her discussions with museum managers across Southeast Asia to reflect on the need to look for new ways to approach disruptions and unforeseen events in museum practice. While museums in Southeast Asia, as in most parts of the world, turned to digital programming strategies to curtail declining visitor numbers—even once museums reopened—greater consideration was given to the importance of thinking about targeted health and safety measures to ensure mental and physical wellbeing for staff and visitors alike. More broadly, she argues, there is great strategic value in thinking of the museum as an altogether healthy and salubrious space.

While the acceleration of worldwide vaccination efforts and stronger immunisation coverage may be signs that we are now beginning to emerge from a long sanitary crisis—and from the accompanying economic, political and social turmoil—museums must now be prudent in rethinking their role in helping societies work through difficult times. Museums must carry out their role in helping communities to illuminate how individual and collective conflicts and traumas have been (or are currently being) experienced, interpreted and worked through. They have done so on several occasions in times of crisis: for instance, during the post-war period in Europe, when large and small museums took part in efforts to rebuild devastated societies following a global push set by UNESCO and ICOM; during the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when museums departed from mainstream museographical approaches in favour of community development; and through museums’ more recent decolonisation efforts, with the aim of meeting new socio-political demands in an ever-expanding cultural market.

How can museums with closed doors serve society? Should new museum models still depend on the physical presence of visitors to reach their strategic goals? Should the whole sector be digitised, and if so, what implications does this have for material collections and storage areas? Is a virtual museum experience the same as a physical museum experience? What kind of visitor experiences should the museum of the 21st century be able to offer? What are the unprecedented new challenges facing museums in a post-pandemic world? These are just some of the questions museum professionals have been forced to ask themselves since the beginning of the pandemic, and to which the authors of this issue have provided some preliminary answers.