By: Staff Writer
February 8, 2022
Changing over to a digital platform has been a huge challenge for cultural institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a key problem was with sustaining the digital platform said a cultural leader in the region in new Inter-American Development Bank publication.
The IDB, in a new publication, “Healing a Broken World,” explores how culture can help to shape the post-pandemic recovery by highlighting several cultural experts on how they see the development of the arts and culture playing a part.
One of those cultural leaders, Amanda de la Garza, General Director of Visual Arts and of the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM (Mexico), said in promotion of using Museums as a public arena: “The question about the contemporary definition of a museum is not new; this question has been present in the public discussion for at least a decade. It is not just a matter of thinking about the historical debts that museums, as modern institutions, have in terms of equity and racial and gender justice, both within our teams and in programming—those who criticize museums are part of a broader conversation that encompasses the processes of decolonization and depatriarchalization of both institutions and public life. For museums, this implies thinking about our role in society, in the current context as well as in history.”
“Are we capable of digging into our history, shaking our foundations, and consequently, acting to make inequalities visible, to correct and redirect our programming and art collections policies,” she asked?
She added: “In the case of the MUAC, the first schism we faced was the migration to a digital platform. We generated stable digital programming that sought to offer specific content to the museum’s different audiences— new, remote, loyal, unknown—under different topics. These contents were extended to a very wide range of activities, including creative tutorials for children, interactive dynamics, podcasts that sought to dialogue with different cultural agents about the current moment and its effects, editorial recommendations, reviews of the museum’s exhibition archive, a virtual room for the temporary exhibition of videos by artists from different origins and exhibition projects designed for the virtual world. Our website and social networks have never been more alive.
“This was complemented with a rich academic arm with specialized distance learning courses and two international virtual meetings. The first, called ‘Digital Museum. Citizenship and Culture,’ reflected on the relationship between digital cultural initiatives and citizenship processes, and the second, ‘Constellations. Contemporary Indigenous Art from the Americas,’ focused on discussing the notion of contemporary indigenous art.”
Ms de la Garza also said: “The museum’s digital programming posed significant challenges. One consisted of having the capacity to sustain digital programming in terms of production and validity. By this I mean the artistic or production quality of the content, as well as the challenge of understanding which issues were important to discuss within the context of the pandemic. The proposal to “be relevant” as an institutional responsibility originates from the commitment to understanding cultural institutions as part of the social world and not as inaccessible “cathedrals,” while managing to articulate the ways in which they can contribute and be part of the public arena. Certainly, this implies a non-autarchic conception of museums and simultaneously requires “attentive listening.” In other words, it is necessary to know how to read and take the temperature of a given social sensitivity in a given context.”
She added: “This forced migration to the digital world produced many changes at various levels. It taught us, in a very open way, the imperative need to develop tools to be able to interact with virtual communities and to produce content that is made for different modes of circulation and interaction. However, digital audiences, unlike face-to-face audiences, are still being constituted as such, to the extent that in the past, the digital programming of museums was extremely limited.
“Their condition as audiences has developed under peculiar and extreme conditions, such as confinement, social distancing, working from home offices, home schooling, and the impossibility of seeing each other and converging in private and public spaces. In this sense, museums still have much work to do in terms of understanding who these new audiences are, how they differ, and how they connect with the in-person public. At the same time, in this digital maelstrom, we must also think critically about the consequences of digital production for audiences, artistic communities, and the cultural ecosystem as a whole, in artistic, institutional, and economic terms. Thus, museums should promote good practices in digital programming that do not intensify the precariousness of the communities with which they work, such as museum educators, artists, and/or academics.”