What is a co-creative museum? How can a museum activate and strengthen mutuality among its many component communities? When is it legitimate to speak about the collective creation of programmes, languages and tasks in an institutional context? Is the social a new museum mandate? How can the construction and care of patrimony and heritage find a correlation in the relationships the museum fosters with its diverse communities?
How can the museum engage with the social processes affecting our immediate communities? This function lies at the natural heart of museum practices in Latin America, where many museums vigorously take up the mantle of responding to lesser developed economic contexts in which social disparity, inequality and discrimination are the order of the day.
Cultural institutions in this region are highly experienced in collaborating with artists to position the arts as a vehicle for the development of the imagination, the expansion of concepts and forms of education, the production of communal and individual knowledge, and resistance to authoritarianism; in short, as a path of effective micropolitics towards concrete social transformation, community-building and the promotion of social justice.
The need to empower museums in a context of exponential vulnerability has today extended to the whole world: institutions can feel vulnerable over non-existent codes of governance and ethics, and their lack of clarity or effective application, or over insufficient financial resources that are either too weak to support operations in less developed contexts or too scarce to face the competition of the art market in the more economically advanced contexts.
Museums that have been able to function and prosper in unfavourable conditions have a great deal to offer and a great deal to say. Furthermore, inequity in human and natural rights is a trait that has become widely visible during the Covid19 pandemic: gender, economic and religious forms of discrimination, racism and hatred are on the rise, challenging all parameters of stability. The current levels of distress in most societies demand that museums privileged enough to work with living artists are rising to the occasion to develop fast, flexible and effective responses and methodologies that can bring about social and educational micropolitical change by grounding the force of their actions in the diversity and intrinsic freedom of thought, expression and creativity that is at the heart of artistic practice.
