In the context of the various rapid transformations taking place in the world today, the roles of museums are being rethought, resulting in urgent requests for engagement as regards the current questions and challenges facing human societies. Museums are being required to reflect upon those challenges, to be a forum for discussions and negotiations, and to take up an activist approach towards the future, as highlighted forcefully by diverse scholars and museum experts such as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett or Fiona Cameron.
At the same time that ideas about various highly needed reconceptualizations of museums are being brought forward, the awareness of the concept of ‘intangible cultural heritage’ is growing significantly.
To get there, intangible heritage brokers5 provide museum professionals with inspirational and pragmatic methodological tools emphasizing the “great potential [of intangible cultural heritage] to address pressing issues in today’s world in innovative ways, and to contribute to the identification and implementation of sustainable solutions” for the future
My argument, however, is that in the museum sector broader time alignments are critical when engaging with intangible cultural heritage. The multidirectional relationships between the past, present and future that museums create and use when working with intangible cultural heritage will have to be taken into account more profoundly in the discourse about building bridges across, and collaborating between, the sectors.
Auteur: Sophie Elpers
Maart 2021