Zhang Yang

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A seminar focusing on the revival of national museums was held Thursday at the Wuzhou Guest House in Futian District, which is a parallel event to the three-day UNESCO High-level Forum on Museums that opened in Shenzhen on Thursday.

One of the guest speakers was Adriana Lopez, director of Museo Casa De La Momoria, a memorial museum in Medellin, Columbia.

Lopez talked about how the museum has been built into a space to collect memories of armed conflict victims in Columbia and offer visitors an opportunity to imagine a city or a country in peace.

Columbia has suffered decades of civil conflict and its people are facing high levels of violence as the country has long been a major producer and exporter of illegal drugs.

According to Lopez, the museum — which opened its doors to the public in 2013 — has received over 13,000 visitors, and it offers a space for conflict victims, academics and people from all walks of life to share their stories and talk about issues regarding human rights violations.

“For us the biggest challenge is that we are collecting memories of a conflict in a conflict that is still happening,” Lopez said, adding that she hopes the museum can heal some victims who have suffered from the conflict and enable people to see another future or possibility for their society.

Nguyen Thi Bich Van, director of the Vietnamese Women’s Museum, said that the museum had faced a number of challenges before it was renovated in 2010. For example, the museum only had 30 to 50 visitors per day before the renovation, and its poor quality and out-of-date facilities were not capable of meeting the different needs of the audience, Van said.

Van said that things changed after they renovated the museum and reorganized the collections. For instance, they changed the method of selecting objects and presented the exhibitions through a story-telling format infused with rich and comprehensive information.

Most importantly, the focus of the museum had changed. “We transformed the museum from a historical-cultural museum into a gender museum, which represents women’s issues in a gender context,” Van said.

The number of visitors has been increasing since the museum hosted a variety of activities highlighting women’s issues while working with the local community and cooperating with NGOs, embassies and other museums. “Voices of marginalized groups are raised in the museum, which creates a social dialogue,” she said.

Mzalendo Kibunjia, director of the National Museum of Kenya, which was founded in 1910, said that the museum is becoming a public space for people to have dialogue about polarizing topics. For example, the museum offered a place for people to learn and talk about HIV in the 1980s when at the time the public was reluctant to discuss it, and now it encourages people to share ideas on homosexuality and other social issues.

Kibunjia also mentioned that the museum has 6.5 million fossil collections, but that he was concerned about the conservation and storage of fossils in Africa and hoped the rest of the world would share the responsibility of conserving fossils as a human heritage.

Editor: Jane Chen