A qualidade em museus: problemática a esclarecer

Em resposta ao repto antes enunciado e pensando no caso concreto dos museus, a problemática a esclarecer neste estudo prende-se com a questão de saber como romper com o modelo instituído de avaliação, manifestamente desadequado para captar a complexidade de estratégias, evidências, resultados e visões que informam a realidade museológica contemporânea nas suas múltiplas vocações e missões.

O que é que são museus com qualidade pedagógica? O museu criativo como alternativa à educação formal da criança

O paradigma pedagógico tradicional, centrado essencialmente na figura do professor, tem colocado demasiada ênfase no adestramento do pensamento lógico da criança, em detrimento de actividades que promovam o sentido lúdico, a fantasia, a imaginação e a criatividade (Gabriela Cavaco, 2000).

Qu’est-ce que la qualité au juste?

Qu’est-ce que la qualité au juste ? • Une catégorie esthétique qui relève du goût, toujours relatif ? • Une marque de commerce certifiant la fiabilité du produit, exposé à la contrefaçon ? • Une règle de déontologie appliquée à toute production humaine s’évaluant , aujourd’hui, par le service rendu, par la satisfaction du client, par la fidélisation de celui-ci ? • Le degré d’habilité technique ou professionnelle de l’artisan ? • Un jugement de valeur partagé entre l’objectivité et la subjectivité ? • Une mise en boîte brevetée ?

Gestão da qualidade em museus

As técnicas e métodos de controlo e gestão da qualidade, inicialmente desenvolvidas na indústria, têm vindo a encontrar novas áreas de aplicação, intervenção e desenvolvimento. Estes novos desenvolvimentos devem fazer-se através de uma adequação cuidada dos conceitos a estas novas realidades. Transposições simples acarretam mais problemas do que contributos para soluções. Constituindo os museus uma destas áreas, pretendemos introduzir alguns conceitos essenciais e abrir perspectivas de interpretações de conceitos, requisitos e critérios de avaliação.

A colecção do IPQ e o público

1 – O Instituto Português da Qualidade Criado em 1986, pela Lei Orgânica, através da Lei Orgânica, na dependência do Ministério da Indústria e Energia, com a missão de desenvolver a politica da qualidade para a sociedade em Portugal, para a qual se apoiou nos subsistemas da metrologia e da normalização.

The Creation Process of a Local Museum

The present text holds as its main goal the advance of a number of reflections around the potentialities and problems of local museums taken as development instruments. Secondarily, it also intends to provide support to all those who, in one way or another, have faced the issue of creating a local museum. This support is intended not as a manual of the “the museum made easy” kind, but, instead, as the pointing to some pertinent issues and unavoidable options that, if not taken into account, will come to challenge the form and substance of the future organisation.

To think museology today

In the present text we intend to analyse 5 basic documents that translate the Museological Thinking in our century and that, chiefly, have led professionals of the area to apply this “science” in a less hermetic way and to understand its practice. The option to study and analyse the documents results from the fact that they influence present day museological practice and thinking. It is impossible to speak of museology nowadays without referring to one of these documents, not to mention a few nations that have even modified and/or created specific laws for the management of their preservationist cultural policy. Anyway, we are aware that this text intends only to carry out a preliminary approach to the documents, in the sense that the wealth of its content would allow us to slowx over an infinity of issues that they raise. I specifically refer to the documents produced at UNESCO Regional Seminar on the Role of Museums in Education, which took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1958; at the Santiago Round Table in 1972, in Chile; at the 1rst New Museology International Workshop, in Quebec, Canada, 1984; at the Oaxtepec Meeting, in Mexico 1984; and at the Caracas Meeting in 1992. These are documents elaborated within the ICOM –International Council of Museums. These documents are the result of a joint reflection by professionals who seek the evolution of ideas within their areas of action, recognising that in order to do so it is necessary to leave the cocoon of the museological institutions and try to discuss their conceptual advances with professionals of related areas. It is important to be capacitated to reuse these advances in their areas of action. This is the recognition of the importance of interdisciplinarity for the museological context.

Museologial process : exclusion criteria

In the last few years, reflections around knowledge building in the museology area have increased considerably, allowing us to cast many gazes over our actions, and, consequently, enabling us to a wider debate around our professional action field, decreasing our exclusion from the academic environment – museologists reproducing the knowledge produced in other areas. In the present work, we shall approach some issues related to the museological process, taking as a reference several studies about the subject, which, due to the time given to us in this round table, could not be re-presented here for discussion. Besides, we have dedicated a chapter to such approach in our publication titled “Museological Process and Education: building a didactic-community museum”. So we have opted instead to carry out a reflection about exclusion, looking into the museum institution and into the application of museological processes; in other words, we shall carry out a self-criticism, in which I include myself, affecting an analysis that will be debated here, considering, additionally, that the museums and museological practices are in relation to the other social global practices, therefore, they are the result of human relations at each historical moment. Finally, based on our lived experience, we shall give continuity to our reflection process, highlighting the importance of knowledge production for the area of museology and the relevance of the theory-practice relation, punctuating some aspects we think that may contribute to the construction of a museological action that may serve as a historical elaboration in securing a space for self- determination.

Museology as a pedagogy for heritage

This essay presents some parameters for the study of Museology and its respective contribution for the constitution of preservationist processes, biased towards heritage education. From the decoding of some parameters that delimit this applied discipline’s action and reflection field, the text presents some paradigms, which have stimulated its epistemological construction and have guided its social functions. These paradigms are considered responsible for a new methodological order within the scope of the museum and, further, for the new commitments that these institutions have taken up.

Museologial action's main fields

Museology has emerged and has been organised as a field of knowledge, precisely to frame the technical, theoretical and methodological aspects, regarding the constitution, implementation and evaluation of the processes that societies establish for the selection, treatment and extroversion of the memory indicators, transforming them into patrimonial references and projecting them into the constitutive fields of cultural heritage. It is therefore, one of the areas of knowledge that deals with the framing of heritage and their professionals are agents of memory education. The constitution of the parameters that define and delimit the museological action field has been outlined in the course of the centuries, if we consider the technical efforts related to the identification and organisation of collections, in addition to the curatorial treatment of specimens from nature, of objects, of the intangible heritage registers. The same length of elaboration is true if we evaluate the communication initiatives and of education of the senses.

Memory and power : two movements

The institutions that work with the preservation and diffusion of cultural heritage - be them archive, libraries, museums, art galleries or cultural centres - present a certain discourse about reality. To understand this discourse, composed by sound and silence, by fullness and emptiness, by presence and absence, by remembrance and forgetting, an operation is implied, not only with the enunciation of speech and its gaps, but also the comprehension of that which causes to speak, of who is speaking and of the point whence one speaks. Preservation and destruction, or, in another way, conservation and loss, walk hand in hand in the arteries of life. As suggested by Nietzsche (1999, p.273), it is impossible to live without loss, it is entirely impossible to live avoiding destruction to play its game and drive the dynamics of life on. However, by means of a kind of tautological argument, one often justifies preservation by the imminence of loss and memory by the threat of forgetting. Thus, one ceases to consider that the game and the rules of the game between forgetting and memory are not fed by themselves and that preservation and destruction are not opposed in a deadly duel, but instead they complement one another and are always at the service of subjects that build themselves and are built through social practices. To indicate that memories and forgettings can be sown and cultivated corroborates the importance of working towards the denaturalisation of these concepts and towards the understanding that they result from a construction process also involving other forces, such as: power. Power is a sower, a promoter of memories and forgettings.

The informal museology

No matter how elementary the level of attention that is paid to contemporary Museology in Portugal, its multifaceted character should nevertheless be acknowledged. It is a site where concepts, attitudes and aims cross, translating not only museology’s general guidelines, but the role and the place that the different actors in the most diverse processes seek to occupy in society, in the affirmation of the shared right to a full citizenship. The different forms of museology that has developed throughout the country, in particular post April 25, vouchsafes the statement that, in parallel with State museums, there came to light hundreds of museological processes by initiative of the cultural and ecological associative movements, in addition to those of the reinvigorated autonomous power. There are tens of thousands of people who, in various ways - more or less elaborated or theorised - find in museology the privileged expression means on issues concerning so many heritages – historical, architectural, linguistic, archaeological or anthropological - within the context of the valorisation and identification of local specificities and competences.

The construction of the museological object

Exhibiting is or should be to work against ignorance, especially against the most refractory of all ignorance: the pre-conceived idea of stereo typed culture. To exhibit is to take a calculated risk of disorientation - in the etymological sense: (to lose your bearings), disturbs the harmony, the evident , and the consensus, that constitutes the common place (the banal). Needless to say however it is obvious that an exhibition that deliberately tries to scandalise will create an inverted perversion which results in an obscurantist pseudo-luxury - culture ... between demagogy and provocation, one has to find visual communication's subtle itinerary. Even though an intermediary route is not so stimulating: as Gaston Bachelard said "All the roads lead to Rome, except the roads of compromise." It is becoming ever more evident that museums have undergone changes that are noticeable in numerous areas. As well as the traditional functions of collecting, conserving and exhibiting objects. museums have tried to become a means of communication, open and aware of the worries of modern society. In order to do this , it has started to utilise modern technology now available and lead by the hand of "marketing" and modern business management.

Quelques idées sur le musée comme institution politique

Il n'y a rien de plus politique que la volonté de jouer un rôle dans le changement des sociétés, des techniques, des cultures, des économies, des relations internationales, des modes de développement. C'est même une idée subversive, qui ne plaît pas toujours aux politiciens et aux technocrates.